At the end of every November, I come to terms with the enormity of my ever-growing holiday-season watchlist. Some years, I can’t wait to dive in — what better way to unwind after doing the Thanksgiving dishes for two straight hours than to hoot and holler at the part of Elf in which Amy Sedaris casually goes on a manic riff about her plan to single-handedly declaw eight kittens? (A perfect bit if ever there was one.) Other years, though, the Christmas spirit eludes me and the prospect of rewatching a dozen holiday-themed sitcom episodes starts to look more like a forced march. It’s in those years, especially, that I turn to the subgenre of crime movies set around Christmas, which tends to juxtapose the aspirational cheer of the season with broken characters who can’t quite get onboard with it.
If there’s a filmmaker most closely associated with Christmas crime, it’s Shane Black, who has set nearly all of his films around the holiday since writing the script for 1987’s Lethal Weapon. As a writer, Black is drawn toward lonely, sympathetic assholes who speak in rat-a-tat dialogue chock-full of curse words and pop-culture references. It’s a decidedly ’90s-guy vision of cool that occasionally teeters into annoying in movies like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but the Christmas setting counteracts that obnoxiousness by serving as emotional ballast. Every visual reminder of the holiday season in a Shane Black movie asks a question: Isn’t it a little sad that this is what these guys are doing at Christmas? As Tres Dean wrote in a Vulture story on the filmmaker’s oeuvre last year, “A Shane Black Christmas isn’t all that merry.”
The same could be said of the holiday in The Silent Partner, a 1978 Elliott Gould thriller that plays in many ways like a precursor to Black’s films. Directed by Daryl Duke, the Toronto-set crime caper follows a mild-mannered, stuck-in-a-rut bank teller named Miles Cullen (Gould), whose only personality quirk is that he collects exotic fish — a hobby that would seem random if it wasn’t such an apt metaphor for his own existence. Miles works at a bank branch inside the Eaton Centre shopping mall, where his mundane life is on full display through the storefront’s fishbowl-esque glass windows. One day, he finds a discarded piece of paper that reads, “The Thing in My Pocket Is a Gun. Give Me All the Cash.” He deduces that someone is scoping out the bank for a robbery and narrows his list of suspects down to the mall’s Santa Claus (Christopher Plummer). Overnight, Miles formulates a plan to shortchange the thief by emptying most of the register into his Superman lunch box before the robbery.
To Miles’s surprise, his plan goes off without a hitch and he walks away with $48,000. What he doesn’t count on is that the thief, Harry Reikle, is an unhinged sadist. After Reikle hears a news anchor say how much money was taken in the robbery, he puts two and two together and starts to hound Miles in an ever-intensifying game of cat and mouse. To divulge more of the plot would be to spoil the precise, Hitchcockian twists and turns of the movie’s script, adapted by Curtis Hanson from an Anders Bodelsen novel. (Hanson is another significant contributor to the Christmas-crime canon thanks to his work on this and L.A. Confidential.) Suffice to say, though, that Miles turns out to be a more formidable opponent than Reikle anticipates, repeatedly outmaneuvering Reikle’s brute force with the strategic foresight of a chess player. With every victory he notches, Miles gains confidence and starts to imagine aspects of his future besides what exotic fish he’s going to buy next. Pretty soon, a guy who normally spends the holidays alone (apart from the obligatory visit to his ailing father) is dreaming of falling in love and starting over somewhere else.
If the movie allows a little holiday-season optimism to seep in, it rips it away just as quickly with Reikle’s brutal acts of violence. In terms of shock value, The Silent Partner occasionally verges on exploitation-movie territory. (It was even produced under a short-lived tax-shelter program in Canada, which saw opportunistic producers dumping money into low-rent genre films as a tax write-off.) At one point, Reikle puts a woman’s head through Miles’s fish tank — a scene that Duke reportedly refused to direct, leaving his responsibilities to the film’s second unit. In a sloppier movie, the sporadic violence may become numbing, but it’s to Duke & Co.’s credit that here it mostly just adds to the atmospheric dread. The performances, too, give the movie a lived-in feel with Gould compellingly muting his usual megawatt charisma, Plummer going Hot Sociopath mode, and Céline Lomez bringing both charm and tragedy to the role of Elaine, who gets caught up in the two men’s brinkmanship (not to mention a young John Candy, who injects some necessary humor into the movie as Miles’s horny co-worker).
The holiday spirit is a fickle thing. If you’re not feeling it, no number of Christmas Story viewings can magically jump-start it, despite what the programmers at TBS might think. During those years, the Christmas-crime canon awaits, and few of its entries contain imagery as indelible as Christopher Plummer fleeing the scene of a robbery in a stolen car, methodically peeling off each piece of an impossibly intricate Santa costume.
