The Inside Story

A year or so ago, TCM ran a night of little-known movies from Republic Pictures. I recorded a couple of them, but held off on doing a blog post on The Inside Story because it's only available on streaming video. However, since I've been running out of space on my DVR, I finally decided to watch it to do a post on it.

The movie starts off with a couple of guys going through their safety deposit boxes in a bank in small-town Vermont. Horace Taylor (Gene Lockhart), who ones the local inn, and "Uncle" Ed (Charles Winninger), who works for Taylor, talk about how keeping stuff in the safety deposit box keeps stuff out of circulation, which reminds them of an incident that happened in their town back in 1933....

Not long after being inaugurated US President, Franklin Roosevelt instituted a "Bank Holiday" that closed all the banks so that people would stop causing bank runs by removing all the money that's been deposited. (You may recall from It's a Wonderful Life when James Stewart talks about the money being invested in the houses of the neighbors of people taking out their money.) Since there were no credit cards back then and people used checks less often, the resulting lack of cash created all sorts of problems, and a whole bunch of people in their town had their own personal money problems back in 1933.

One day, Eustace Peabody (Roscoe Karns), who works for a collections agency in New York, comes with ten $100 bills for a local farmer. However, the farmer can't come into town because his wife is giving birth, so Peabody has to keep the cash in the hotel safe. Uncle Ed puts the money in the safe and gives Peabody a recieipt.

Some time later, grocery store owner J.J. Johnson comes looking for Taylor to pay off his grocery tab. Taylor doesn't have the money to do it, and swears that there's no money in the safe. But he opens it and finds the envelope, with the bills, which is addressed to Waldo Williams (William Lundigan), a struggling artist in love with Taylor's daughter Francine (Marsha Hunt). Waldo owes Taylor money, so he assumes this is the payment for his debt, and pays the cash to Johnson.

Meanwhile, Peabody grows impation that the farmer isn't showing up, and plans to go back to New York. Except that he needs to take the money with him if he can't pay the farmer. Taylor, for the obviously understandable reason that the money isn't in the safe, tries to stall Peabody while he gets the money back from Johnson. Except that Johnson doesn't have it, because he paid off his debt to landlady Mrs. Atherton (Florence Bates). She's hired an attorney, who gives the cash to his daughter to do some purchases. Further complicating things is that there are a couple of bootleggers who want the cash for themselves.

While watching The Inside Story, I couldn't help but think of an older Pete Smith short, The Grand Bounce which has much a similar plot except that it involves a check that's going to bounce if the writer can't get it back. I thought the short worked better, largely because the movie takes a long time to get to the main action of the cash going into circulation. That, and the movie came across as an endorsement of Roosevelt's anti-hoarding assault on private property (which notably included confiscating gold). Once the movie finally does start dealing with the search for the cash, it gets a lot better.

As I said, The Inside Story is as far as I can tell not available on DVD, although you can watch it if you can do the Amazon streaming thing. I couldn't find whether The Grand Bounce is an extra on any DVD.