Last year St. Clair McKelway wrote a series of articles for the "New Yorker" about an elusive counterfeiter. Known as "Mr. 880" from the number of his Treasury Department file, this counterfeiter left a trail of disarmingly crude one-dollar bills across four boroughs of New York and the Staten Island Ferry, and led the Secret Service the longest chase in its history.

When finally flushed from cover, 880 turned out to be a genial old junk dealer, a former Navy man who preferred printing up funds to collecting his pension because he felt he was saving the government money. Eight-eighty ran off his dollar bills on ordinary bond paper, using a tiny hand press which he affectionately called his rich Cousin Henry. He tried to make sure that no storekeeper would be stuck with his handmade currency more than once, and he spent the money, mainly, to entertain an adoring army of neighborhood children. By the time he was convicted, 880 had so captivated the Secret Service that it got him off with one of the lightest counterfeiting sentences on record.

Twentieth-Century Fox has unfortunately overlaid McKelway's remarkable story with a vencer of slick plot and slovenly acting. An incipient love theme stumbles awkwardly in and out of the hunt for 880; it involves Burt Lancaster as the Treasury man who catches 880, and Dorothy Maguire as a U.N. interpreter who had little to do with the original story at all. Lancaster handles a wide range of emotion by wrinkling his forehead (sincerity), rolling his eyes (bewilderment), and flashing a hair-trigger smile (most everything else); Miss Maguire is hyperthyroid. What saves the picture is the warm and careful performance of Edmund Gwenn as old 880, and the richness of McKelway's material. This material was good before the screen writers got to it, however, and they could have turned an entertaining movie into a possibly great one by leaving well enough alone.