Southside 1-1000

I admit I missed the part where this particular phone number was mentioned though I did hear others.

This 1950 film was directed by Boris Ingster, actually known as a writer and tv producer. I bet his only other directing credit is Stranger on the Third Floor.

Expert counterfeit plate engraver Eugene Deane (Morris Ankrum) is serving a prison sentence where he spends reading the Bible. However, part of the Bible is cut out so he can continue to make counterfeit plates. He packages them and sneaks them out through an unknowing priest.

When it's discovered he's still on the job, FBI agent John Riggs (Dom Defore) infiltrates the gang as a wealthy criminal who wants to buy a huge amount of counterfeit currency. He becomes involved with a woman (Andrea King) who works at the hotel where he is staying.

Deane is a dying man and, while being transported to a care facility, he escapes and makes his way to the gang, putting Riggs in danger.

Typical FBI procedural film. Crime dramas like this were often narrated, making the films semi-documentary. I've seen tons of them, and I have to say this one is the most heavily narrated I've ever seen. The opening narration about the Korean war, Communism, and the soundness of the dollar was nearly enough to stop watching.

The most interesting thing occurs when Riggs sends one of the thieves out with a $10 bill (carrying a help message) to buy food. Well what didn't they buy - a bunch of sandwiches, beer, pizza - it came to $4.49. That's $60.05 today. They may have overpaid.

Southside 1-1000 has to work hard to wash out the sour taste left by its obligatory, patriotic opening: Stock battle footage runs under a voice-over linking the importance of a sound national currency to the Korean conflict (then playing at a theater of war near you) and the diabolical, all-encompassing threat of Communist domination. Whew! (It was the early cold-war era, and viewers were all but required to swear a loyalty oath before they could enjoy even a B-programmer.) Unluckily, it doesn't work hard enough.

Locked up in a federal pen, a top-notch forger pores over his Bible until lights out, when he whisks out his engraving tools and etches the plates for `queer.' Smuggled out, they go on the presses turning out counterfeit bills to be uttered at race tracks and Vegas poker parlors. G-Man Don DeFore (an avuncular figure familiar from television - Ozzie and Harriet, Hazel) goes undercover to track down and infiltrate the source of the funny money. Middleman Barry Kelley goes down (literally, through a window) but the brains of the operation stay at large. Then, as a big-spending good-time Charley, DeFore catches the eye of Andrea King, daughter of the old jailbird. But his cover is blown at his moment of greatest peril....

The director, Boris Ingster, occupies a curious niche in Hollywood lore. In 1940, with Stranger on the Third Floor, he gave the public an elliptical, dreamlike suspense movie that came to be regarded by many fans as the very first film noir. That's a tough call to make, and at any rate Ingster can hardly be counted among the noir maestros (in fact, he directed but three movies). He returned to the cycle as it was peaking and had even begun to cannibalize earlier successes.

Despite two or three sequences that rise a notch or two above the pedestrian, Southside 1-1000, can only be graded ho-hum. The best thing in it has to be Andrea King, but she's allowed to bare her fangs fully only too briefly at the end. And while its numerical title remains so evocative of the noir series as a whole (Call Northside 777, Dial 1119, 99 River Street, 711 Ocean Drive), Southside 1-1000 simply warms over material than had been often traversed over the few years previous, most remarkably by Anthony Mann in T-Men.

Pacy T-Man movie, one of only three directed by Boris Ingster, whose STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR is held by many to be the film which kicked off the 'film noir' cycle. A narrative voiceover lends a pseudo-documentary air to the tale of a square-jawed treasury agent, John Riggs (Don DeFore), who is tasked with cracking a counterfeiting ring initiated by a dying master forger from inside his jail cell. Once on the trail, Riggs adopts a false identity in the hope of ingratiating himself with the crooks, and this brings him into contact with larcenously inclined hotel manageress Nora Craig (Andrea King). Although this is fairly standard stuff, with the rather annoying voiceover failing to ratchet up the tension as it did in Kubrick's THE KILLING, Russell Harlan's often moody location cinematography (see also GUN CRAZY & RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11) and King's hardboiled femme, together with one or two nifty, if contrived, twists make this a worthwhile diversion for fans of noir obscura.