The Jason Hernandez School of Self-Defense revolves around one major tenet: try to freak out the person who’s attacking you.
For example, if someone breaks into your house while you’re home and gets aggressive with you, grab a knife, but don’t try to intimidate that person with it, particularly if they’re armed with something more impressive than what you’ve got. Instead, use the knife to cut your own hand and then rub the blood all over your face and laugh. Make that motherfucker feel like he just broke into the home of a very dangerous, crazy person.
In other words, out-psycho the psycho.
Another example: Let’s say that you’re camping in the woods, but you’ve seen too many horror movies. Your imagination runs wild with thoughts that someone in the dark is watching you. You feel scared and vulnerable.
There’s a simple solution to this one.
While you’re camping, wear a hockey mask with streaks of realistic fake blood on it and tote around a similarly stained machete. Maybe even get extra-creative and wear a necklace of bones that you got from a pet store. Look for all the world like an insane murderer while you sit and peacefully read comic books by the light of your Coleman propane lamp. Pre-emptively scare the shit out of anyone who’s even thinking about attacking you. Your chances of being killed go down quite a bit when you appear to have racked up a decent body count yourself.
That’s what I did the last time I went camping, at least. And nobody tried to kill me.
100% success rate.
Anyway, the great thriller The Silent Partner is a movie that’s sort of almost about that very topic.
Elliot Gould is a nebbish-y bank teller who’s unlucky in love and dotes on his fish tank. He’s your basic dork and we watch him putter through his life for a good half-hour, but Gould’s got a secret: He plans to steal a hefty sum of money from his employer. About forty thousand dollars in 1978 money, which is fifty million dollars today, I guess (don’t quote me on that).
Gould’s scheme is to take advantage of clues he discovers that the bank is about to robbed by a guy in a Santa Claus disguise (yes, this is a Christmas movie). The result of this is that Gould can now cover his own theft by simply pinning it ALL on the robber. High-fuckin’-five.
One of the many twists in this plot comes when the robbery is big news and the amount of money that the bank lost is made public. The thief (Christopher Plummer) hears this and knows that he got screwed. He only stole a fraction of the amount reported. He also instantly figures out what’s up and proceeds to terrorize Gould for the rest of the cash. He’s serious, too. In addition to bank robbery, Plummer’s other pastimes include rape and murder.
The plot thickens further when Gould turns out to be way more of a badass than we thought. Oh, he gets scared, but he cools down just as quick. He’s strategic and cunning and he’s a much bigger problem for the more seasoned crook than anybody expected.
The key to this film’s greatness are the performances. Gould does a top-shelf job at making both sides of his character–the huge dweeb and the criminal strategist–believable. He doesn’t play two roles here. There’s no single moment where we see Gould flip the switch and make a personality change. Rather, through some mystical, advanced-level actor’s liquid ability, Gould makes us feel that his character’s threatening new turn is not in defiance of his character’s rank geekiness, but rather is a product of it.
In other words, Gould understands that nerds can be dangerous for all sorts of reasons.
Then there’s Christopher Plummer as one of the best villains of 1978. He’s slick and careful, but also crazy behind the eyes. He has the presence and mannerisms of a snake. Scary. Magnetic. We could watch a whole movie of him grocery shopping simply for a glimpse at how a guy like this interacts with the world.
Throw in a delirious plot and a disarmingly romantic undertone (Gould’s real problem here when you think about is that he wants a little love) and you’ve got a smart and eccentric thriller that brings Hitchcock levels of firepower.
See it.