Southside 1-1000

Another of the little-known movies that Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley was Southside 1-1000. As always, not having heard of it but it sounding reasonably interesting, I decided to record it in order to be able to watch it and put up this post on it.

The movie opens up with expository narration and scenes of Washington DC telling us about the importance of sound money, especially in fighting the war on Communism. The movie was released in late 1950, not long after the start of the Korean War, and this introduction really seems tacked-on since the Korean War and Communists don't really have all that much to do with the movie. Counterfeiters, well yes those do.

Indeed, one of the best counterfeiters, Eugene Deane (Morris Ankrum), has been making his plates while holed up in San Quentin and hiding the prints in a bible. (This wouldn't be the first movie to have a theme of counterfeiters working behind bars; one of the Ronald Reagan Brass Bancroft movies had a similar premise.) In those days, it was the job of the Secret Service to find counterfeiters -- remember, before the Department of Homeland Security the Secret Service was part of the Treasury Department. They don't know who got the plates, so the attempt is made to figure out who's distributing the bills produced, and suspicion falls on a traveling salesman named Bill Evans (Barry Kelley).

Unfortunately, both he and the actual people running the counterfeit ring get the impression he's being watched, which results in his getting defenestrated for his trouble. The Secret Services realizes they need an undercover agent involved in getting the bills distributed, in the hopes that this will lead to whoever is actually running the ring. John Riggs (Don DeFore) is selected for the part. He goes to the Los Angeles hotel where Bill was last known to be staying, run by Nora Craig (Andrea King), in the hopes that he'll be able to meet the person running the outfit. The people running it are of course smart and make Riggs bide his time.

Eventually Riggs does get to meet a man who isn't the actual ringleader, but a representative, which is another sign of just how clever these criminals are. John's story is one that it's been a bit tough for the Secret Service to manufacture, leading the counterfeiters to wonder whether or not Riggs is who he says he is. Things gets much more complicated, however, when Deane escapes. He'd been ill enough that the warden wants to transfer him to a prison on the outside, but on the train journey there he overpowers his guard and makes his way to Los Angeles. This leads to the finale, although as you can probably guess considering the opening narration -- and never mind the Production Code -- the good guys are going to win this battle.

Southside 1-1000 is a low-budget movie that certainly betrays that low-budget nature. It does so in large plot by having a plot that feels completely unoriginal and taken from plot elements that had been recycled from a bunch of counterfeiter movies before it. The plot twists aren't particularly surprising either, and Don DeFore isn't exactly the most hard-boild person to be playing a Secret Service agent. The idea is OK, but the execution could be better.