Do not let your kid sit on this Santa’s knee! One of the great unheralded thrillers of the ’70s, Silent Partner is a taut thriller with great performances, featuring one of the nastiest Santas to ever grace the screen. Written by Curtis Hanson—who would go on to direct L.A. Confidential—Silent Partner follows a mild-mannered Toronto bank clerk (Elliot Gould) as he double-crosses a larceny-minded Santa (Plummer), only to discover that he has woefully underestimated the ramifications of this act. Reviewing the film in 1978, Roger Ebert called Silent Partner “a small miracle: a thriller that was not only intelligently and well acted and very scary, but also had the most audaciously clockwork plot I’ve seen in a long time… (its) ironies and reversals and neatly inevitable triple-crosses are worthy of Hitchcock.” He’s not lying. Gould is at his everyday-schlub best, while Plummer—Captain Von Trapp, for goodness’ sake!— is a revelation as a creature of pure malevolence. As Christmas movies with body counts go, Silent Partner is near the top.