Neat Flick

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE SILENT PARTNER Directed by Daryl Duke Screenplay by Curtis Hanson

It is Christmas time, and the bank clerk, a lonely, smart, mild-mannered fantasist, is suspicious of the Santa Claus working the shopping-center plaza just outside his glass doors. It looks to him as if old Santy is about to pull a heist and that the clerk's till is his likely target. He confides his suspicion to no one, and when the stickup finally occurs, the teller simply diverts some of the loot from the robber's outstretched hand and into his own briefcase. By permitting the authorities to think the thief got away with much more than he really did, the clerk imagines, he will be able to abscond with more than half the boodle. That will add up to some very nice new specimens for his tropical-fish collection.

It is a neat and believable scheme, the heart of a neat and suspenseful little film. The clerk (played by a subdued but still witty Elliott Gould) has not reckoned with the sadistic vengefulness of his unwitting accomplice (a thoroughly nasty Christopher Plummer). Soon he is being harassed, with ever increasing violence that begins with scary phone calls and ends in brutal murder. Gould mobilizes himself, moving in persuasively small stages from quiet clerk to man of action forced to deal with the consequences of fantasy. The inevitable duel, cool brain vs. hot brawn, is well developed, with genuinely surprising twists that do not violate the movie's finely tuned logic.

Even better, writer and director take time to explore not only Gould's character but his relationships with his fellow employees at the bank. Among them is Susannah York, who is one of the few leading ladies whose sexiness is mature, genuine and likable. Her missed-signals romance with the understandably distracted Gould helps ground this film in a recognizable reality. But everyone here has an existence outside the plot, and as a result we become enmeshed in this film as we rarely do in crime pictures.

Director Duke has a gift for this sort of thing. A few years ago, in the under-attended Payday, he did a shrewd study of a small-time country singer whose melodramatic, violent character was rendered believable because of the man's roots in the milieu Duke carefully sketched in. In the same way, an improbable crime story becomes painfully plausible, thanks to the selective realism with which its story is told. There is one torture sequence that goes too far in its violence for the context, but on the whole this is as satisfying an entertainment as there is around at the movies just now.

-- Richard Schickel

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