The Silent Partner

TCM's Star for today in Summer Under the Stars is, as I mentioned a few days back, Christopher Plummer. I have one of his lesser-known movies on my DVR, although unfortunately it's not airing on TCM today. Still, I figured that with his being honored today, it would be an appropriate time to put up a post on that movie, which is The Silent Partner.

Technically, the star of the movie is Elliott Gould. He plays Miles Cullen, who works as a teller at a branch of the First Bank of Toronto in a major Toronto shopping center. As the movie opens, it's the Christmas season, and Miles is romantically interested in one of his co-workers, Julie Carver (Susannah York). He uses some of the bank's carbon paper deposit slips to write love messages to Julie, although it turns out that she's interested in the branch manager even though the manager is already married. At the end of the day, Miles plans to throw out these deposit slips, but notices that one of them has a message on it of the sort that would be written by a bank robber. Except, of course, with it being the end of the business day, nobody's actually held up the bank.

But Miles notices something. The letter G as used in the hold-up note is typographically weird in that nobody else writes a G like that. And Miles sees a sign with the same G, which is being used by one of the shopping center's charity Santas. So Miles obviously has a good idea of who the robber -- if there'Bs going to be a robbery, of course -- would be. But Miles does something stupid. Instead of telling his bosses and the authorities, Miles comes up with a plan to reduce how much money a robber could get by putting the cash that's supposed to go in his teller's till into a separate cash box such that with the money there instead of the till, the robber won't get away with so much.

Sure enough, Santa comes in to the bank. His real name is Harry Reikle (Christopher Plummer), and surprisingly, the bank guard doesn't require him to take off his Santa hat and beard to transact business at the bank. Santa goes up to Miles' window and asks for all the money, which isn't very much since most of the cash is not actually in the till. Harry gets away and nobody can identify him since he's dressed as Santa. But at this point, there's another major security breach, in that the news reports interview everybody without the bank management coordinating this. That, and it's revealed how much money the bank was robbed of, which as far as they know is how much they're short.

What the bank doesn't know is that Miles has a bunch of the money, which he subsequently puts in his safety deposit box. However, when the news reports mention how much money was stolen, Harry sees the news reports and realizes he's been robbed, or at least that somebody else has the cash that he would have gotten had the money been in the till as it should have been. Harry wants that cash, and with the news reports clearly identifying Miles as the teller, Harry knows just whom to contact to get "his" money.

Miles has no intention of giving up that money, either to Harry or back to the bank, since if he gave it to the bank they'd know he didn't follow procedure and would be out of a job. What Miles doesn't know at first is just how violent Harry is. Miles comes up with a way to get Harry arrested, but certainly this is only going to be a temporary way of getting Harry off his back. Certainly Harry is going to get out of jail and immediately come looking for Miles, who doesn't even bother to move to a new apartment.

How will the plot be resolved? Will Miles be able to live happily ever after and avoid jail time? After all, we no longer have a Production Code (and the movie was made in Canada anyway), so it's certainly possible for Miles not to have to face any punishment despite basically embezzling the bank's money. But to see how things work out, you're going to have to watch the movie for yourself.

I'm surprised that The Silent Partner isn't well-known at all, since it's got a pretty good cast (there's also a young John Candy in a supporting role), as well as a very entertaining plot that's expertly handled. It's a shame that it's been largely forgotten, and certainly it's something that ought to be better remembered.