The worst thing about most Christmas films, particularly those made for US television, is that they tend to pile of the saccharine to an almost unbearable degree. Perhaps that’s why “Killer Santa” and other festive horrors appeal so much, as a corrective to the anodyne homilies and simple-minded moralising we usually get from our Christmas films. The Man in the Santa Claus Suit, though well regarded in some quarters, is really a sort of schmaltzy retake of the Amicus horror anthology From Beyond the Grave (1974) but with an aged Fred Astaire in his penultimate film (his last would be John Irvin’s terrible Ghost Story (1981)) replacing Peter Cushing’s sinister shop owner.
Astaire actually turns up in multiple roles, interacting with the three customers of his costume shop (he turns up as a cop, a chauffeur, a hot dog seller and a taxi driver among others) though no-one ever recognises him. His customers include Bob Willis (Gary Burghoff, much loved as “Radar” O’Reilly in both the film and television incarnations of MAS*H), a lonely and introverted maths teacher who falls in love with fashion model Polly Primer (Tara Buckman) but is too shy to tell her. Polly is already engaged to marry the millionaire Rod Sanborn (David Greenan) and Bob hopes, for reasons that are hard to fathom, that dressing up as Santa will somehow impress her. Elsewhere, down-on-his-luck maitre d’hotel Stan Summerville (comedian John Byner) is living on the streets and is on the run from low-rent mobsters Babyskin (Eddie Barth) and Bruno Betinger (Ron Feinberg) to who he owes a considerable sum of money. Buying a Santa suit as a disguise, and increasingly desperate Stan winds up breaking his way into the the home of Dora (Nanette Fabray) and Dickie Dayton (Harold Gould) and their obnoxious grandchildren Melissa (Debbie Lytton) and Lance (Patrick Petersen).
And finally political adviser Gil Travis (Bert Convy) is too busy overseeing the re-election campaign of a local senator to care much for his estranged young son Terry (Andre Gower) and wife Linda (Brooke Bundy) and hopes that dressing as Santa will bring them back together again. The lives of the three men occasionally intertwine and all changed by their experiences with the Santa suits while in the final shot, the shop keeper’s real identity is finally revealed but as the title pretty much gives it away it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise.
The Man in the Santa Claus Suit is pretty much more of the usual Christmas film fare, the sort of film where even the “evil” mobsters are more bumbling comic relief than actual hardened criminals and where everyone is ripe for rehabilitation and redemption. The cast, made up of a host of familiar small screen faces, is fine (John Byner is particularly good as the surprisingly eloquent Stan and look out for Star Trek regular Majel Barrett as a secretary) but the simple-minded philosophising gets overbearing very quickly, as does the ineptitude of the badly-dressed gangsters and their not particularly funny comic interludes.
There’s a touch too much of the “true meaning of Christmas” guff we’ve come to expect from this sort of thing, we’re subjected to some of the small screen’s worst child performances (the smart-mouthed grandchildren are particularly loathsome – “you kids are really rotten” is one of the greatest understatements in any 70s made for TV film) and a handful of completely unnecessary and painful song and dance routines from Fabray and Gould. The attempts at comedy are woeful too, adding nothing to the story but helping to slow things down even more, making the film seem an awful lot longer than it really is.
On the plus side, Astaire is great, though we’d expect nothing less, there’s some fine New York in the 70s location work and to its credit there are few other made for television films that would include a conversation about the 18th/19th century German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. But none of it really makes up for the stock characters and situations, the sluggish pace and the often soap opera-ish feel. The Man in the Santa Claus Suit gets by these days on the not inconsiderable power of nostalgia, much loved by those who saw it in the late 70s and early 80s but today it looks naive and laboured and only the presence of Astaire – who isn’t terribly well served by George Kirgo’s screenplay, based on a story by Leonard Gershe – makes if of any interest.
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