Know Your Money

This is a Crime Does Not Pay short. The Secret Service is battling counterfeiters. It would have been nice to go inside Treasury to see the real printing process. I'm guessing that showing realistic looking fake bills is more than enough for the government agents. It's interesting to see the fake process with the fake bills. The best counterfeiting sequence is "To Live and Die in L. A." This one doesn't have the energetic fun but it does seem like a bit of real faking. It's interesting to see some of the old forensics and old surveillance. The story isn't much with only a twenty minute short. It's all about the old fakes.

This interesting episode of MGM's long-running CRIME DOES NOT PAY series concerns itself with counterfeiting, the production of fake money and its distribution, from the engraving of the plates, to its distribution, through the inevitable unmasking of the villains with much peering through microscopes and button-pressing, because criminals never prosper. That's what the series title tells us, after all.

People may note with some puzzlement the title at the beginning which informs the audience that the Secret Service gave special permission to show real money on the screen. People think of the Secret Service as guarding the U. S. President. Although it does that too, as an arm of the Treasury Department, it mostly concerns itself with policing money. One of the laws forbids reproducing money.... after all, that's what counterfeiting is, and for decades, showing real money on the screen was deemed as a variety of the crime.

Know Your Money (1940)

*** (out of 4)

Part of MGM's "Crime Does Not Pay" series, this short takes a look at how the Secret Service makes sure counterfeit money doesn't end up switching hands in America. The film centers on a small group of people passing around fake ten-dollar bills and how the Secret Service eventually catches them. This entry in the series takes great pride in telling us we're actually seeing how counterfeit money is made and passed around. We get a title sequence at the start of the film letting us know what we're watching is real and that adds some fun to the movie. I'm a big fan of this series and this here is yet another worthy entry as it contains some good thrills as well as telling a good story. The performances are all quite good, the direction tight and in the end this is well worth viewing if you're a fan of crime dramas.

Surprisingly good, fast-paced short about the Secret Service tracking down counterfeiters. The acting here easily surpasses the original tv Dragnet while still taking a documentary-drama approach to the subject. The details about how the bogus tens are distributed and moved around the NYC region is pretty ingenious and holds the viewers attention. We see high society types in on the action, cons using kids to make small purchases to get lots of real $1 and $5 bills back and of course some underworld types straight off central casting. But it all works well and this is a short well worth catching up.

I rarely watch the shorts on TCM when they are interspersed between features. And in this case, I was about to turn it off, though as the film progressed I found I was unexpectedly intrigued by the movie. That's because although the subject matter seemed a little dull at first (counterfeiting), the way this was so deftly handled impressed me. Instead of over-hyping and making the good guys seem like super-heroes OR making the dialog seem like an episode of DRAGNET, this film was extremely realistic for the time. And where I usually expected to see unrealistic Hollywood heroics that defy logic, the characters seemed to act like I would have expected real Secret Service agents to act. This way, the film is almost like a tiny time capsule of the age instead of fiction. Intelligent, well-paced and above all, interesting! A short subject film well worth your time.