Money to Burn (1973) Online

I remember seeing this movie during the early to mid-70's. Great premise where a prison inmate not only manages to counterfeit a sizable amount of cash but comes up with a novel way of smuggling it out of prison. The burden then falls on his wife and a crew of various skills to figure out how to manage the counterfeit money. Their plot is novel and imaginative - but will it work?

Great cast with E.G. Marshall as our favorite counterfeiter, Mildred Natwick as his faithful (but slightly larcenous) wife and David Doyle as the helpful and unwitting accomplice warden. Doubt I'll ever get to see this again - but if the chance comes along don't miss it.

This movie had a clever plot to it: A counterfeiter has the sharp idea to exchange a million dollars of his bogus bills with worn-out money that is earmarked for destruction. The problem is, the real money is kept in a vault, and the floor in front of it is super-sensitive to contact: even the weight of a feather will set the alarm blazing. The con (and his safe-cracking partner) ask a retired master crook how to do it. The guy half-jokingly answers, "Why don't you walk on the ceiling?"... and the partners get a wild idea.

This movie sets up the counterfeiter and the safe-cracker as the protagonists (I suppose "heroes" is too nice a term, since they are after all criminals), and that is the big weakness of the movie. We root for these two guys to pull off their harebrained scheme and to finally get away with it, but we can't forget this basic rule: this is a TV movie, and according to the Television Code a lawbreaker must be punished for his or her misdeeds. The movie tries to present us with a kind of "have your cake and eat it too" ending (I can't say more without turning it into a spoiler), but I suspect most viewers will find the ending just a bit of a disappointment.