Silent Partner Review

John and Bill, the heroes of Silent Partner, are gamblers who haunt the greyhound racing tracks. They`re born losers, and about all they have is one another. When the mysterious racing identity Mr. Silver, whom we never see, offers them a greyhound, Silent Partner, it seems like the chance of a lifetime - but it`s no surprise that these no-hopers are in for a bumpy ride.....The theatre origins of Silent Partner are pretty evident, and the material doesn`t work all that well as a film. The wall to wall dialogue is sometimes quite funny, sometimes touching, but most of it better suited to the stage. The performances are the thing here -David Field and Syd Brisbane are both excellent as these losers, although they`re so infuriatingly hopeless that it`s a bit hard to sympathise with either one of them.Comments From Margaret PomeranzI think Silent Partner is a good experiment. It has excellent performances from both David Field and Syd Brisbane and the language of the film has a sort of boozy poetry to it. Alkinos Tsilimidos obviously has talent as a director just to make this on the budget he had. The downside is that the derivations of this film as a play, a two-hander, are fairly obvious. It tends to be a series of drunken conversations between two losers who take a punt and experience some disappointment and pain but find that they actually belong together. Is it the contemporary Waiting For Godot? It?s not an enormously cinematic film and it?s not a film with a great emotional sweep. But as a demonstration of two fine actors at work in a challenging narrative and a director making a low budget film out of sheer frustration, it works.