THE SILENT PARTNER **

Daryl Duke's excellent and underrated thriller "The Silent Partner" is an ingenious heist movie with an over-active vicious streak and a couple of very good performances from Elliot Gould as the bank clerk who figures out his bank is going to be robbed and steals the money himself and from Christopher Plummer as the bad-to-the-bone crook out for his money and revenge. It's a simple enough plot but it's a tale well told, full of neat twists and Plummer is indeed splendidly nasty just as Gould is wonderfully duplicitous and there's good work, too, from Susannah York as the colleague Gould's in love with and who's not quite as innocent as she appears. Director Duke, who also made "Payday" and very little else for the big screen, does nothing to detract from the action and keeps it all bubbling along nicely. A sleeper that slipped under the radar and is now ripe for rediscovery.