MISTER 880 was #53 at the box office in 1950, a feel-good crime tale in a year jam-packed with hard-boiled noir items. This one also happened to be a true story, adding to the satisfaction vibe.

ANN: “Someone once said that a task left undone creates a void that no amount of achievement can fill.”   STEVE: “Who’s the imbecile who dreamed that one up?”   ANN: “I am.”

New York City, 1948. Secret Service agent ‘Steve Buchanan’ (Burt Lancaster) is given a shot at solving a case that’s baffled Treasury officials for ten years; tracking down a counterfeiter nicknamed ‘Mister 880’, who specializes in $1.00 bills and makes a circuit of locales in the Bronx and Brooklyn. At first, clues point to a lady named ‘Ann Winslow’ (Dorothy McGuire) and Steve finds her of interest not only due to clues (she’s passed some bills–inadvertently) but because she just doesn’t fit the profile: she works as a translator for the U.N. She’s also single and beautiful. Ann finds out Steve’s game, and has fun teasing him: he soon clears her and they hit it off. What neither knows is that her neighbor, a poor, kindly, somewhat eccentric junk collector nicknamed ‘Skipper’ (Edmund Gwenn) is actually the elusive gent Steve and the government are after.

Directed by consistent hit-maker Edmund Goulding, the script by Robert Riskin was based off a story that St. Clair McKelway (Sleep, My Love and The Mating Of Millie) wrote for The New Yorker and put into his book “True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality“. The real-life paper passer played by Gwenn was Emerich Juettner, 72 when he was caught. He lived another five years after this movie came out, and ironically made a lot more money from the flick than he ever did cranking out phony bills.

Four years in and after nine dramas—all crime related—Lancaster got to show a light touch in this, backed by his other 1950 release The Flame And The Arrow, a popular swashbuckler. In the seven years since her 1943 debut in the charmer Claudia (also directed by Goulding) McGuire had also mostly been noted for dramatic work (A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, The Spiral Staircase, Gentleman’s Agreement), so it’s nice to see her freed up to flirt—while being smart, a bingo combo. Gwenn, a year older than the man he played, started in movies in 1916, and had been in Hollywood since 1935, winning fame in 1947 with Miracle On 34th Street. He followed that Oscar win with a batch of lovable codger roles (all hail Them!) and for this deft portrait of a painfully honest ‘crook’ he nicked another Academy Award nomination for Supporting Actor.

Burt’s determined and serious yet genial lawman is backed by a coterie of character actors who specialized in authority figures of one sort of another: Millard Mitchell, Hugh Sanders, Howard St. John, Larry Keating, Minor Watson. Like the decent if technically larcenous Skipper/Juettner, the movie is a relic of its day, so old-fashioned (the upright Feds) and charming (the quarry, the romance) that it’s kinda sad: there was a time when government officials were actually trusted.

Bills collected: $4,900,000. With Herb Vigran, James Millican, Billy Gray, Minerva Urecal and Robert Foulk. 90 minutes.