The Riveting 1978 Thriller The Silent Partner Has A Lot to Offer Beyond One of John Candy's First Film Appearances
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The 1978 thriller The Silent Partner occupies a curious, unique place within John Candy’s filmography. When Candy appeared in the critically acclaimed adaptation of Anders Bodelsen’s 1969 novel Think of a Number, which future 8 Mile director Curtis Hanson adapted for the big screen, SCTV’s legendary run had already begun and the funnyman had a few minor film appearances to his credit.
It was apparent from the very start that Candy possessed that ineffable quality that separates ordinary performers from legends and superstars. Even within a group as impossibly gifted as SCTV’s cast, Candy stood out.
There’s a damn good reason that Saturday Night Live desperately wanted to steal Candy from SCTV the way it did Martin Short and, to a lesser extent Robin Duke and Tony Rosato: Candy was a goddamn star. Anyone could see that.
So it’s strange and a little disconcerting seeing a man who would soon become the center of attention in damn near everything he did happily relegated to the sidelines in a masterful Hitchcockian thriller.
In The Silent Partner Candy ably plays the minor supporting role of affable bank employee Simonson. Candy’s handsome young man on the go works at a bank in a mall in Toronto with protagonist Miles Cullen (Elliott Gould).
Like Candy, Gould has a big personality and a big persona. Gould was one of New Hollywood’s preeminent smartasses, a wise-cracking rebel locked forever in a war of wills against the uptight forces of propriety.
The Silent Partner finds the M*A*S*H slacker icon delivering an uncharacteristically quiet, restrained performance as a man who is calculating and meticulous in everything that he does, particularly his foray into the world of crime.
Miles has a job at once banal and glamorous, boring and dangerous. It’s an ordinary office job with the notable exception that on any given day a lunatic might show up in disguise waving around a huge gun and take everyone hostage and/or start pumping coworkers full of lead.
The Silent Partner is a workplace drama about a crime of opportunity and the cold-blooded professional thief who does not take kindly to being ripped off by a nice man in a suit with a respectable job.
The professional thief in question is woman-beater, bank robber and all around bad dude Arthur Reikle (Christopher Plummer, whose beautiful blue eyes have never seemed more sinister). When we first see the film’s unforgettable villain he’s dressed up as Santa Claus for the purpose of scoping out the bank where our hero works. But the psychotic Kris Kringle is less interested in giving than in taking, at gunpoint if necessary or possible.
Miles is almost preternaturally good at reading people. So our crafty hero figures out what the bad Santa is up to and squirrels away a large sum of money in a Superman lunchbox, then proceeds to give the bank robber only a small percentage.
The savvy bank employee then reports to the police that the thief took nearly 50,000 dollars in Canadian money that he himself actually stashed in a safe deposit box for future use. It would be a perfect crime except that the bank robber figures out what his adversary has done and becomes fixated on stealing back the money that Miles has stolen from him.
One of my least favorite cliches involves a chessboard being trotted out as a visual metaphor for the hero and villain being immersed in a high stakes metaphorical chess match.
Just about the only cliche I find more obnoxious and overused than metaphorical chessboards is the old trope where the hero and the villain are two sides of the same coin, to the point where the villain could, at a particularly dramatic moment, assert to the hero that they are not too different, ultimately, and may just be more alike than they’d like to admit, to themselves or to the universe.
The Silent Partner is so masterful in its storytelling that it comes close to validating two of the hokiest thriller cliches in existence. Gould’s savvy player has a chessboard in his apartment and is later seen carrying around a book about playing chess.
You could say that Gould and Plummer’s brilliantly realized characters are playing a high stakes metaphorical chess game neither can afford to lose. It would also be accurate to say that these seemingly different men, one of whom is the very image of buttoned-up propriety, the other a deranged killer and career criminal, actually have a lot in common.
The terrifying bad guy will do anything to purloin the small fortune Miles has stashed away, including having his girlfriend sleep with him in a bid to unearth the location of what he never stopped seeing as his money.
The Silent Partner is a tense, artfully crafted thriller about the furious machinations of two very different kinds of criminals but it’s also a character study about the fascinating ecosystem of a Canadian bank during Christmastime.
I’ve seen The Silent Partner a few times. I pick up new things each time around, like the fact that Miles’ crafty crime seems motivated at least partially by his pointed anger towards an asshole boss who is having a fling with Julie Carver (Susannah York), a coworker he has a crush on.
There’s consequently an element of existential rebellion to Miles’ actions. Stealing the money is a way of escaping a lonely, small life he no longer finds satisfying. So he risks everything as an intellectual challenge that eventually wracks up a body count.
The perfectly cast Plummer is terrifying. He’s perfectly matched by Gould in one of his finest roles and performances as an idealized everyman who is almost too smart for his own good.
The Silent Partner is one of the best movies Candy ever made. It’s not a John Candy movie but rather a movie that Candy appeared in. It seems perverse to put a funnyman like Candy in a movie and not allow him to be funny. But if Candy is going to toil happily in the margins of a movie that is not about him or his character in any real way, thank God it’s at least a very good one.
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