One of the most hardcore, violent Christmas movies isn’t a horror flick with Christopher Plummer, the scariest Santa of all time, in The Silent Partner.
I grew up in Canada, and I’d wager the experience – at least as far as pop culture goes – was probably pretty similar to growing up in the States. Yet, there were some minor, strange differences. Here, we have a regulatory body called the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), which ensures that about 30% of the content that’s broadcast on TV qualifies as “Canadian Content.” Thus, whenever you turn on the TV, one of our Canadian channels is bound to show something Canadian, including movies. While holiday classics like A Christmas Story and Black Christmas counted as Canadian Content (God Bless Bob Clark) we could reliably see around the holidays, more adventurous TV stations would show something outside the box. One such station was the adult-oriented Showcase (not to be confused with Showtime), which would program an utterly mental movie called The Silent Partner every Christmas Eve.
If you’re not Canadian, you probably have no idea what this movie is. It is part of a genre affectionally known as Canuxploitation, where US companies would take advantage of our government tax shelters and shoot genre movies here. American actors, amid career droughts, would usually split their time between Canada and Italy to shoot these kinds of films. The Silent Partner was a more sophisticated piece of Canuxploitation, with a screenplay by the late Curtis Hanson, director of L.A. Confidential.
In it, Elliot Gould plays a bank teller working in Toronto’s Eaton Center over the holidays. One day, he’s robbed by a department store Santa Claus, and in the chaos, he manages to skim $50,000 for himself, while Santa gets a lump of coal. It’s too bad for him, though, that Santa is a raving psychopath named Arthur Reikle, played by a ripped and crazy Christopher Plummer. He sends a beautiful woman (played by Montreal starlet Celine Lomez) to seduce him, only for her to eventually switch sides, leading to a shockingly violent third act that takes The Silent Partner into horror territory (nothing says Christmas like a head in a fish tank).
It’s a crazy little movie that’s exceptionally well-acted by Gould and Plummer. The film always resonated with me as, for a little while, I worked as a bank teller over the holidays and found it a miserable experience. Seeing all that cash pass hands was…tempting. I always appreciated Gould’s performance, which is trying to do something a little different (dare I say it – Canadian) with him, toning down his usual neurosis and playing the role in a calm, detached manner that works. At the time, Gould’s career was on the downslide (although he had a hit right after this came out with Capricorn One), but he was still delievring interesting performances.
However, Christopher Plummer is a revelation as one of the evilest villains in screen history. His Reikle is a misogynist sociopath with a fondness for masochism. Despite being in his fifties at the time, Plummer got into amazing physical shape for the part, and his role here will blow away those who mostly know him from The Sound of Music or his late-era roles.
It’s a strange film to play during the holidays, but if you like a dark Christmas movie, this is for you. Interestingly, despite being a classy thriller, it’s far more violent and gory than Christmas slashers like Black Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night. Poor Celine Lomez suffers a horrible fate, while it’s all tied together by a sophisticated piano score by famed Canadian pianist Oscar Petersen. Doubling down on its Canadian bonafides, John Candy has a small role as one of Gould’s fellow employees, with the two sharing a joint at one point in a nod to Gould’s counter-culture fame from earlier in the decade.
Ironically, if you want to see The Silent Partner in Canada, where it was produced – you’re out of luck. It’s not streaming anywhere in Canada despite being a bit of a homegrown classic. By contrast, you can find it easily in the US, with it streaming for free on Kanopy. So, you Yanks may want to give this one a try. It’s an insane little movie. As for Canadians, there’s a Blu-ray of the film out there that came out not too long ago, so allow me to keep beating the physical media drum…