The 1970s Crime Season!

At this rate I think there is a good chance that Elliott Gould could become one of my favourite actors of all time based on his 1970s output alone. This is the second crime film I've seen with him in from that decade in the last couple of months, after The Long Goodbye, that turned out to be nothing like I expected.

I only had vague notions what The Silent Partner might be about anyway before I watched it - all I knew about it was that it has received almost totally positive reviews from everyone that has watched it on my activity page since I joined Letterboxd last year. I certainly wasn't expecting a cat-and-mouse…

Yet another wonderful Letterboxd discovery for me.

This is, simply put, one of the best 'cat and mouse' films I have ever seen. I was recommended this film due to a discussion started around a list on this site (found here ), so I knew next to nothing about it. When I saw in the opening credits it had been scripted by Curtis Hanson, I was immediately hooked. And boy, was I in for a treat.
This is the kind of film that slowly takes you in, makes you care for its main character (a pitch perfect Gould) and makes you understand his actions. The way Gould slowly transforms his insecure bank teller to a man of action is truly…

The 1970s Crime Season!

At this rate I think there is a good chance that Elliott Gould could become one of my favourite actors of all time based on his 1970s output alone. This is the second crime film I've seen with him in from that decade in the last couple of months, after The Long Goodbye, that turned out to be nothing like I expected.

I only had vague notions what The Silent Partner might be about anyway before I watched it - all I knew about it was that it has received almost totally positive reviews from everyone that has watched it on my activity page since I joined Letterboxd last year. I certainly wasn't expecting a cat-and-mouse…

Cat-and-mouse 70's style

There's a lot of things that usually were better back in the day, and The Silent Partner have a few of them up its sleeve. There were also a few things that didn't work as well, and this movie managed to throw in a few of those to remind us of positive progress as well.

Elliot Gould was great as the opportunistic bank-teller, but I wasn't as impressed with the bank robber, Christopher Plummer. Most of the problems were however with the scripting rather than the acting, so he's really not much to blame. Susannah York and Céline Lomez' characters had some great ups and annoying lows, but in these days of PG-13 I got to admit…

So when people ask what my favorite movie is I always struggle to answer, it's just too difficult of a question. Without fail though, I almost always recommend this movie. I have shown it to a countless number of people and it has made a fan out of every one of them.

When I went to Weird Wednesday on this night I was anticipating seeing a crazy Gary Busey movie from the 1970's called "Didn't You Hear..." but when the projectionist opened up the film can they discovered that it didn't have the right movie in there. So Lars substituted this film, which he had not either. It's a Canadian production starring Elliott Gould, Susannah York, and Christopher Plummer. There's…