Daryl Duke's The Silent Partner (1978)

The timing of The Silent Partner is notable:  it begins in the weeks before Christmas when the mall is busiest and merchant deposits are high.  It's also the season when the gulf between material desire and actual means is most pronounced.
--Nathalie Atkinson, "Noir City," vol. 12, no.3

Daryl Duke was a talented Canadian director who mostly worked in television but did direct the excellent Payday in 1973 and got a significant tax break for making A Silent Partner in Toronto in 1978.  Its genre is the so-called "neo-noir," a term I don't much care for (perhaps post-noir might be better).  The differences from true film noir include being made in color, more explicit sex and violence and the crooks getting away with the loot and going unpunished.  All these elements are in place in Duke's film.  The true film noir was about disillusion at the end of WWII and the neo-noir is sometimes about disillusion caused by Vietnam, though it is never mentioned in Duke's film, which stars Elliot Goud (in one of the four films he made in 1978) as a bank clerk who keeps some of the money that he claims to have given to robber Christopher Plummer, dressed as Santa Claus.  Plummer is good at math and figures out that he got less money than the newspapers stated and starts to harass Gould for the rest, which Gould has, of course, taken for himself.

There is, of course, a good girl (played by Susannah York) and a bad girl (Celine Lomez) and Gould makes love to them both.  Plummer is something of a psychopath, usually an uninteresting character but given an unusual cleverness by Plummer, in spite of his violence.  Gould, however, matches him in cleverness and even raises him a bit.  Duke and cinematographer Billy Williams give Toronto an effectively  drab look at Christmastime, as Gould's collection of exotic tropical fish makes him yearn for a warmer climate. The script is by Curtis Hanson -- who wrote Samuel Fuller's White Dog (1987) and went on to direct his own neo-noir, L.A. Confidential (1997) -- from a Danish novel by Anders Bodelson.