Harry and Walter Go to New York

One of the movies that TCM ran on Diane Keaton's day in Summer Under the Stars was Harry and Walter Go to New York. As is my wont, a made a point to watch it since I had never seen it before, which would give me the opportunity to put up a post on it.

The movie opens up in Sudbury, MA, in 1892. Harry Digby (James Caan) and Walter Hill (Elliott Gould) are a vaudeville double act doing a musical number, although they also do other stuff like a phony clairvoyant bit. In between the two acts, the action shifts to New York. Adam Worth (Michael Caine) is a gentleman thief who likes to rob banks, keep the cash, and then sell back the bonds. Indeed, he's about to sell the bonds back that he robbed from a bank in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the bank president brought some police with a Massachusetts bench warrant.

As for Harry and Walter, their clairvoyant act is an excuse to pilfer cash out of the paying customers' wallets. Multiple men figure out that they've been robbed, and they too bring in the police. So as you can guess, Harry and Walter also get sent to prison, and it's the same prison where Adam is sent. Why else would the characters be introduced in this way? Anyhow, Adam has the sort of pull that Noël Coward's character in The Italian Job does, and is able to get the plans to a bank in Lowell, MA, that he's planning to rob just to show that any bank can be robbed.

This gives Harry and Walter an idea. When the reformer Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton) shows up with a newspaper photographer, Harry and Walter plan to get a picture of the plans, so that they can rob the bank themselves. Not that they know anything about how to carry out a bank robbery. And not that Adam is going to be happy with them if he finds out, which he is because in their attempts to get the photo they burn the plans. But they're able to escape prison with the help of some nitroglycerin, while Adam gets pardoned and goes back to New York. Unfortunately Harry and Walter have to go to New York themselves to get the picture they took of those plans, meaning they run into Adam again who is really pissed.

Eventually everybody gets to Lowell for the climactic bank robbery. The bank is next to a theater, and Harry and Walter plan to blow the door off the vault during the big musical number near the end of the show so that nobody will hear the explosives. Of course, the plans don't quite go off as planned, forcing Harry and Watler to take more drastic action while both Adam and the bank president Crisp (Charles Durning) are on their tails.

With a cast like this and a wacky heist plot, you'd think you're in for a fun little caper movie. Unfortunately, the movie totally fails. Caan and Gould are both irritating in their comic mugging, and the plot is full of incongruencies, with no good reason for Harry and Walter to wind up in the same cell as Adam as one example. It also goes on much too long, at 111 minutes.

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.