Word: gwenn
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...with the original story at all. Lancaster handles a wide range of emotion by wrinkling his forehead (sincerity), rolling his eyes (bewilderment), and flashing a hair-trigger smile (most everything else); Miss Maguire is hyperthyroid. What saves the picture is the warm and careful performance of Edmund Gwenn as old 880, and the richness of McKelway's material. This material was good before the screen writers got to it, however, and they could have turned an entertaining movie into a possibly great one by leaving well enough alone...
Mister 880. Edmund Gwenn as a lovable old counterfeiter who baffles the Secret Service; with Burt Lancaster and Dorothy McGuire (TIME...
Mister 880. Edmund Gwenn as a lovable old counterfeiter who baffles the Secret Service for ten years; with Burt Lancaster and Dorothy McGuire (TIME...
Shaped by less adroit hands, the movie's inevitable love interest might have proved a stumbling block; instead, it gives the story a lift. One of Gwenn's friendly neighbors, U.N. Translator Dorothy McGuire, inadvertently receives and passes some of the queer, thus catches the eye of T-man Burt Lancaster. Eager to prolong his attentions, she reads up on counterfeiting and begins spouting counterfeiter's argot. This maneuver sets up a clever scene in which Lancaster gives her a whispered grilling at a nightclub table while wandering violinists serenade them with romantic mood music. The romance...
...script's neatest trick, unfalteringly pulled off by Edmund Goulding's direction and Edmund Gwenn's superb acting, is to give the picture's closing episodes the winning quality of Miracle on 34th Street. Like Miracle, in which Actor Gwenn played a put-upon Santa Claus, Mister 880 works up the surefire comic-sentimental appeal of pompous authority melting in the warmth of an ingenuous little man of good will...