Southside 1-1000 (King Brothers Productions, Allied Artists, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Rosemary’s Baby Turner Classic Movies showed as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” a quite engaging if not wholly satisfying movie: Southside 1-1000 (1950). Muller cited other movies made around the same time that contained phone numbers in their titles, like Call Northside 777 and Dial 1119 (though he didn’t mention the most famous one of all, Butterfield “8”, made a decade later in 1960), though oddly the titular phone number is never once referenced in the script for Southside 1-1000. It’s a pseudo-documentary about the U.S. Treasury Department and the importance of its role in catching counterfeiters and taking their phony money out of circulation, and it was obviously green-lighted by Frank and Maurice King (they were brothers, though their last name had originally been Kozinsky) and the folks at Allied Artists nèe Monogram by the huge success of the film T-Men, made in 1947 by Eagle-Lion, which was what the former PRC (Producers’ Releasing Corporation) studio had morphed into when British film entrepreneur J. Arthur Rank put it to ensure a U.S. outlet for his British films. T-Men set the template for these supposedly torn-from-the-headlines stories about counterfeiters and the Secret Service agents who go after them, though one thing Eagle-Lion did that Allied Artists didn’t was cut a deal with the U.S. Treasury to allow them to show genuine U.S. currency on the screen. The supposedly “legit” money we see in Southside 1-1000 is laughably phony and looks more like Monopoly money than anything accepted in the real world. Eddie Muller outlined the unusual production history behind Southside 1-1000; the King brothers originally intended it as a follow-up to their major hit Gun Crazy (1949), one of the masterpieces of the film noir era. They counted on being able to use Gun Crazy’s director, Joseph H. Lewis, but Lewis had signed a contract with MGM on the strength of the success of Gun Crazy and was currently working on A Lady Without Passport, a surprisingly leaden would-be thriller with only hints of film noir.

Instead the director they ended up with was Boris Ingster, a native of Latvia who’d been an assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in the Soviet Union. He came to the U.S. in 1930 and by the end of the decade was doing uncredited rewriting on movies like The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. In 1940 Ingster got the chance to make a quite good crime “B” called Stranger on the Third Floor at RKO about a young reporter (John McGuire) who covers a murder trial, becomes convinced the defendant is innocent, and ultimately ends up suspected of a similar murder himself. Stranger on the Third Floor has sometimes been called the first film noir, and while that ignores some early-1930’s noir precursors like Safe in Hell and Sensation Hunters, it’s an arguable case. It helped that Stranger on the Third Floor was co-written by the great novelist Nathaniel West, though it was hurt by the fact that [spoiler alert!] Peter Lorre’s character was too obviously guilty of both murders. Alas, though Stranger on the Third Floor was a success, it didn’t lead to a major directorial career for Ingster. In fact, his imdb.com page doesn’t list him as a director at all – just a writer and producer (his most famous production credit was on the 1960’s TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) – and he only made three films as director: this one, Stranger on the Third Floor, and a romantic comedy called The Judge Steps Out in 1948. Southside 1-1000 hardly has the mythic or dreamlike quality of Stranger on the Third Floor, and it’s saddled by not one but two prologues, both narrated in the usual stentorian tones by Gerald Mohr. One attempts to tie the work of the United States Treasury Department and its Secret Service (founded during the Lincoln administration when the U.S. first started printing paper currency, and Lincoln and Congressional leaders realized that if the U.S. could print paper bills, other people could too, and there needed to be an enforcement mechanism to stop people from doing that and keep unauthorized bills out of circulation; the business of protecting the President and others in the administration was added later, after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901) with the Cold War and the recently begun so-called “police action” in Korea. The other is a straightforward account of the importance of money to the U.S. economy (well, duh!) and the myriad ways counterfeiters can pass their phony-baloney “money” through casinos, racetracks, and other venues in which a lot of cash changes hands.

The main Secret Service agent we see is John Riggs (Don DeFore, who’s best known today for TV sitcoms like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Hazel), who’s hot on the trail of a counterfeit bill that got passed at a racetrack. It turns out that the bill was stolen by a small-time thief named Nimble Willie (John Harron), whom the police arrest and who probably wonders why he’s being so extensively browbeaten not only by the people who actually arrested him but the Secret Service as well. The plates to print the counterfeit $10 bills were made by Eugene Deane (Morris Ankrum), who’s continued to work making phony plates even after he’s been incarcerated. We’re told that Deane had a relatively lucrative career as an artist and legitimate engraver until he decided to freelance and use those skills as a counterfeiter. The Secret Service goes to see him in prison and find that by all appearances he’s been a model prisoner, incessantly studying the Bible and occasionally besting the prison chaplain on Bible trivia. He’s also terminally ill, and refuses the Secret Service’s offers of leniency if he reveals where his plates are. Deane has arranged to smuggle a newly engraved set of plates hidden inside a hollowed-out Bible, with the chaplain serving as his unwitting “mule.” The gang’s contact is Bill Evans (Barry Kelley), a traveling salesman who’s used that identity as a front to pass the phony money across the country. Chillingly, Evans has a wife, Clara, and a son who have no idea how he’s actually making a living. Unfortunately, the gang realize that Evans is being tailed by the Secret Service and they decide he’s a liability they need to get rid of, so Reggie (George Tobias) and another gang member dispose of him by pitching him out of the window of a tall building. The Secret Service sends Riggs out as an undercover agent, using the name “Nick Starnes,” and by tracing where Evans had his suits custom-made (unlike a lot of movie crooks, Evans didn’t rip out the labels of the clothes), he traces the gang to a Los Angeles hotel run by Nora Craig (Andrea King). At first she seems merely to be a desk clerk, but eventually we learn [spoiler alert!] that she’s really the mastermind of the counterfeiting ring.

What’s more, she’s the daughter of Eugene Deane; we figure that out when she brings Riggs as “Starnes” to her apartment (in a surprisingly explicit sexual invitation for a Production Code-era movie) and shows him a painting on the wall that she says is the work of her father. Riggs, in his “Starnes” identity, poses as a buyer of counterfeit currency and all seems to be going well for him until Deane himself escapes from prison and shows up at the gang’s headquarters, though he dies of his long-term illness before he can alert Nora that “Starnes” is really a T-man. But “Starnes” gets outed anyway when Nora is given a sketchbook that belonged to Deane by the people who buried him. Riggs tries to extricate himself from the situation by making an excuse to go to the corner convenience store for food, which he pays for with a bill telling whoever finds it to call the Secret Service and get him rescued. After the first two-thirds of the film was shot pretty plainly and in full light, it suddenly becomes all-out noir in the last third; cinematographer Russell Harlan starts shooting everything in chiaroscuro shadows and, when both the Secret Service and the L.A. cops get the message, there’s a bloody shoot-out that ends with a baroque chase scene through the L.A. rail yards. (Charles and I both chuckled at the scene at the entrance to Los Angeles’s Union Station – both the exterior and the information desk inside look the same now as they did in 1950, though the storage lockers have been removed – and also the Angel’s Flight railway, which Charles and I not only got to see but actually got to ride during our recent day trip to L.A. Most films noir only show the Angel’s Flight moving in the background, but in Southside 1-1000 the famous angular railway is actually being used on screen to move people.) The film reaches a truly bizarre ending when Riggs and Nora find themselves hanging for dear life to the sides of a concrete bridge over some train tracks at exactly the time that a train ex machina is passing under them. The two struggle on the ledge and, of course, it’s Nora who falls to her death and then gets run over by the passing train. Southside 1-1000 is a pretty good movie overall that gets better as it progresses (so does Rosemary’s Baby, come to think of it!), and there’s a neat in-joke: one of the opening montage sequences shows the marquee of a movie theatre showing Howard Hawks’s Western masterpiece, Red River (1948). Both Red River and Southside 1-1000 were shot by Russell Harlan and edited by Christian Nyby, and the assumption in film-history circles seems to be that Nyby inserted that shot as an elaborate in-joke referencing another film on which he and Harlan had both worked.