Mister 880 (1950)

MISTER 880  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Edmund Goulding
    Burt Lancaster, Dorothy Maguire,
    Edmund Gwenn, Millard Mitchell
For a long time, all I really knew about this movie was its title, and I thought maybe it was about a track-and-field athlete or something. Turns out it's about a dogged Treasury agent (Burt Lancaster) on the trail of a kindly old counterfeiter who's running off $1 bills on a small press he calls "Cousin Henry". Burt's a straight arrow when it comes to queer money, and wants the old man to get the maximum sentence no matter what, but foxy U.N. translator Dorothy Maguire thinks that's kind of unfair, and it all works out more or less happily for everybody in a pseudo-Frank-Capra kind of way, with "Auld Lang Syne" playing in the background. When was the last time anybody bothered to counterfeit a $1 bill?