I’ve been playing a sort of Kevin Bacon game recently where I wanted to watch Mary Poppins (1964) because of Dick Van Dyke (he recently turned 99). His co-star in that film, Julie Andrews, inspired me to watch The Sound of Music (1965). After being reminded what a wonderful performance Christopher Plummer had in that film, I decided to watch a movie the has been in my Kanopy queue for a while now. One that I watched when it first came out – 1978’s The Silent Partner. It also stars Elliott Gould and Susannah York.
The Silent Partner is a “Christmas” movie in the same vein as Die Hard is one. Plummer plays a shopping mall Santa – in one of my favorite malls of all time – the Eaton Centre in Toronto. Love that place – both the mall and the city.
Anyway, it had probably been 30 years since I had seen the film and aside from some slight silliness of dialogue, and as Roger Ebert describes it a “plot, preposterous as it really is” in his Silent Partner review, I was hardly disappointed.
And yet if we forget the logistics and the deal and the movie’s obscurity, what we’re left with is a small but wonderful gem of a thriller: A film in which complicated people and a very complicated plot come together in a mechanism that leaves us marveling at its ingenuity.
So what will be the next Elliott Gould or Susannah York film that I watch. Or, perhaps, a John Candy film. Let’s keep the game going!
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