SOuthside 1-1000 (1950)

I wanted to see SOuthside 1-1000 when I learned that Don DeFore has a starring role. I remember watching him in the reruns of a sitcom called Hazel, and then I learned that he appears in some films noir, too, most notably Too Late for Tears. In Too Late for Tears, he has a supporting role, and he is great as the brother-in-law who finally catches up with Lizabeth Scott, the female lead and femme fatale. He has a starring role in SOuthside 1-1000, where he plays John Riggs, a Secret Service agent on the trail of counterfeiters. But be prepared if you are a fan like me: Don DeFore’s first appearance in SOuthside 1-1000 is a little more than eleven minutes after the start of the film.

SOuthside 1-1000 is available online. Click here to watch it at the Internet Archive.

SOuthside 1-1000 is a semidocumentary that starts by lauding the U.S. government, the U.S. Treasury in particular; the U.S. dollar; and the postwar U.S. economy. U.S. filmgoers in the 1950s would have been enjoying peacetime after the end of World War II and a victory for the United States, so this type of introduction probably would have seemed like well-deserved praise. Once viewers get past the lengthy introduction, the story itself becomes more suspenseful and interesting, with a few plot twists along the way that I found to be pleasant surprises.

The lengthy introduction is stuffed with facts and is told by a voice-over narrator whose job continues throughout the film. The introduction, however, is the longest part of his job, and today’s viewers might find it a bit tedious. Maybe viewers in 1950 did, too, although so much about the postwar United States was so new that maybe all the details were much more interesting more than seventy years ago. Some of the details provide a link to the film’s narrative and include the following:

◊ The Cold War, with its two camps, free versus totalitarian, is in full swing.

◊ Rearmament is needed to fight the Cold War.

◊ The most powerful weapon in this fight is the American dollar.

◊ Protecting the money and the money supply is the goal of the Secret Service.

◊ A counterfeiter is a saboteur.

◊ The film is the story of one (fictional) counterfeiting ring.

The story is based on a true case, but it is fictional, and it is helpful to keep this mind because the semidocumentay style and the voice-over narration can almost make the film sound like nonfiction. The film covers a specific fictional story about a counterfeiting ring, and one counterfeiter in particular, a model prisoner, Eugene Deane, who studies the Bible in prison. He was originally an artist studying in Paris, but he finds it easier to earn more by printing his own money, that is, counterfeiting, in and out of prison. He uses the prison chaplain as a courier. When Secret Service agents, including John Riggs, investigate Eugene Deane’s prison cell, they find etching tools in the sink drain in his cell.

The story gets more interesting with the Secret Service investigation of Eugene Deane, but it gets even more interesting when John Riggs goes undercover. Riggs is the lead investigator, and the leads in his case are drying up. Riggs wants to keep the case from going cold, which is the point when he decides to go undercover. The one slim lead he has is the fact that a member of the counterfeiting ring stayed in the Hayworth Hotel in Los Angeles. So he decides to go for an extended stay at the Hayworth as Nick Starnes, a racket guy from back East.

(This article about SOuthside 1-1000 contains all the spoilers.)

Nora Craig is the hotel manager for the Hayward Hotel, and Nick Starnes (Riggs) starts with her in his quest for leads about the counterfeiting ring. The best way to do that is to ask her out on a date, and Riggs thinks he might be on the right track when he learns that Nora Craig lives in a ritzy apartment that seems to be beyond her means. He eventually learns that Eugene Deane, the counterfeiter who is printing money in his prison cell, is Nora Craig’s biological father, and she, not Eugene Deane, is the ringleader. Nora Craig tells John Riggs that Deane was her biological father, but she grew up with her mother and stepfather and took her stepfather’s name.

Nora Craig eventually learns that John Riggs is a T-man (a Secret Service or U.S. Treasury agent). She is infuriated about being duped, and she is intent on exacting revenge. She drives to the spot where Riggs is arranging to buy counterfeit money to use as evidence, and she blows his cover instead. Riggs is about to be killed when his boss and other Secret Service agents and police officers show up. Riggs is saved while a shootout ensues, but Craig tries to escape with all the money. She is pursued by Riggs, and she falls to her death from a bridge onto railroad tracks and is killed. The film ends there—and with closing music on the soundtrack that is surprisingly upbeat for such a somber ending.

SOuthside 1-1000 is a film that emphasizes its semidocumentary style over its stars. I mentioned that the voice-over introduction is long, and the stars aren’t introduced until well into the film’s running time, for example:

◊ The voice-over introduction is five minutes, thirteen seconds long, which is the point when viewers get to the specific fictional story.

◊ Don DeFore (as John Riggs/Nick Starnes, the male lead) makes his first appearance at eleven minutes, fourteen seconds.

◊ Andrea King (as Nora Craig, the female lead) makes her first appearance at almost the halfway point, at thirty-five minutes, forty-nine seconds.

The film’s title is styled as a phone number from the days way before cell phones and even before operator-less phone calling. The same is true for the titles of the films for all my blog articles in December, and all of the them differ from each other in small ways. In the 1950s, an area code as the phone number prefix was unnecessary—unless, of course, you intended to call outside your local zone, which is probably another phone concept that seems ancient to modern viewers.

Today’s viewers do not need to know anything about telephone history to appreciate SOuthside 1-1000, but it can’t hurt to have a slang dictionary on hand! I often turn on the English-language subtitles for classic films so I can catch the slang terms and look them up later. SOuthside 1-1000 uses a couple of terms that are helpful to know before watching:

◊ bunco: slang for “fraud” (see the Urban Dictionary for more information)

◊ queer: slang for “counterfeit” (click here and then scroll down)

I enjoyed the film very much, but the long voice-over introduction is a drag on the action. Once it’s over, the plot is much more complicated. The suspense builds so gradually that the amount of tension in the narrative comes as a surprise. Don DeFore is worth the wait, especially if you are as much of a fan as I am. Perhaps I am a little biased: The plot of the film took so long to introduce one of my favorite film noir actors that it might be easy for me to pick on the film’s faults!

November 12, 1950, release date  •  Directed by Boris Ingster  •  Screenplay by Boris Ingster, Leo Townsend  •  Based on a story by Bert C. Brown, Milton M. Raison  •  Music by Paul Sawtell  •  Edited by Chirstian Nyby  •  Cinematography by Russell Harlan

Don DeFore as John Riggs/Nick Starnes  •  Andrea King as Nora Craig, the hotel manager  •  George Tobias as Reggie  •  Barry Kelley as Bill Evans  •  Morris Ankrum as Eugene Deane  •  Robert Osterloh as Albert  •  Charles Cane as Harris  •  Kippee Valez as the nightclub singer  •  Joe Turkel as Frankie  •  John Harmon as Nimble Willie  •  G. Pat Collins as Treasury Agent Hugh B. Pringle  •  Douglas Spencer as the prison chaplain  •  Joan Miller as Clara Evans  •  William Forrest as the prison warden  •  Bennie Bartlett as Eddie, the hotel bell boy  •  Gerald Mohr as the narrator

Distributed by Allied Artists Productions  •  Produced by King Brothers Productions