Submitted by Ed F, Mar 15, 2008 23:42

The movie "Mister 880" opens with a photograph of a one dollar bill with a portrait of an old man with glasses and the words "Mister 880" replacing "Washington" under the portrait. The image does not look to me like Edmund Gwenn, and I wondered whether it was in fact Emerich Juettner. Does anyone know? Except for the added romantic interaction between Burt Lancaster's and Dorothy McGuire's characters, the movie seem to follow the actual story reasonably well.

In a later movie, "The Student Prince", Edmund Gwenn played a Doctor Juttner, which was not that character's name in the original story. A delightful allusion.

When I was in Washington, D.C. in the early sixties, the Secret Service had a display of counterfeit currency, including an 880. You had to see it to realize just how bad it was, and the misspelling of "Washington" wasn't nearly the worst of it. In addition to what William Bryk mentions in his article, the color of the paper was wrong. Many small details were missing. The blue silver certificate seal wasn't blue.

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