Word: gwenne
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...real life, the counterfeiter (Edmund Gwenn) confounds and frustrates the Treasury Department for ten years. Dubbed "Old 880" after the number on his bulging Secret Service file, he is a mild little Manhattan junkman, fond of dogs, children and his fellow man. While the T-men break up big counterfeiting rings, he goes blandly on passing his outrageously crude singles. He prints only about 50 a month, barely enough to keep him and his dog shabbily independent. His benign (and shrewd) policy: no more than one to a customer. When the agents finally nab him, they are wholly disarmed...
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...
Screen Directors' Playhouse (Fri. 10 p.m., NBC). Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street...
Suspense (Tues. 9 p.m., CBS). Murder in Black and White, with Edmund Gwenn...