Well, it’s that time of year once more. Today is April 15th, aka Tax Day. There are quite a few films out there with a taxation theme, from The Adventures of Robin Hood to 1776 to Everything Everywhere All at Once. Rather than dwell on that sometimes painful subject, though, I want to introduce you to a tangentially related movie. It’s a winning little comedy set in Washington, D.C. and centered around money…with an emphasis on the printing of same.
Directed by funnyman Howard Morris (whose TV career ranged from Your Show of Shows to Cow and Chicken) and written by sitcom veterans R. S. Allen and Harvey Bullock, 1967’s Who’s Minding the Mint? stars Jim Hutton as Harry Lucas, an employee at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving in D.C. A single man who uses free trials and other tricks to maintain his well-to-do “playboy” image (an image which makes his supervisor suspicious), Harry tries to ignore the attentions of his monogamy-minded co-worker Verna (Dorothy Provine), which include gifts of highly unpalatable fudge. After accidentally putting $50,000 in freshly-printed bills into a bag of Verna’s fudge and later dumping the bag’s contents into his garbage disposal, Harry realizes he’s looking at hard time unless he can hatch a scheme to replace the ground-up greenbacks.
Harry turns to his friend “Pops” (Walter Brennan), a retired government printer caring for his pregnant beagle Inky, for help. The job quickly turns from a two-man caper to a veritable Mission: Impossible team. Hard-of-hearing safecracker Dugan (Jack Gilford) can open the vault where the printing plates are kept, but he needs hearing aids from shifty pawnbroker Luther (Milton Berle). Sewer worker Ralph (Joey Bishop) can guide them through the capital’s sewer system to the Mint, but that requires a special boat supplied by an amusement park “sea captain” (Victor Buono). Harry’s last two recruits are his ice cream truck driver pal Willie (Bob Denver), who keeps a woman whose apartment overlooks where they enter the sewers distracted, and Verna, who’s needed to cut the money properly. Everyone except Verna, of course, wants a piece of the action. Thus a “simple” job replacing $50,000 swells into a seven-million-dollar heist.
The crew’s been assembled, but the imminent arrival of new equipment forces Harry to move the schedule up, a last-minute operation that no one was expecting. Verna comes from her ballet class, while Luther was dressed as George Washington for a lodge gathering. Ralph arrives in uniform from his son’s scout meeting, accompanied by his newly-arrived Italian cousin Mario (Jamie Farr). Topping them all, Pops has to bring along Inky, who could give birth at any moment.
Naturally, everything that can go wrong does, from Dugan’s hearing aids getting destroyed and Ralph getting a face full of printers’ ink, blinding him, to Inky straying off to have her pups and their boat sinking in the sewer. Through it all, the motley crew completes their task, although when Verna learns they made millions more than Harry said they would she storms off. The now-wealthy gang is all set to celebrate. However, if you’ve ever seen Ocean’s Eleven, Topkapi, or any other heist films, you know their good fortune isn’t going to last.
Who’s Minding the Mint? is a quick and breezy slapstick romp with a game cast that anyone who watched TV in the ’60s and ’70s should be quite familiar with. Hutton and Provine are suitably affable romantic leads, even if both seemed to never quite reach the stardom predicted for them early in their careers (Hutton, sadly, died from liver cancer in 1979 at 45. His son Timothy would go on to win an Academy Award for his role in 1980’s Ordinary People). Director Morris was content to let his veteran supporting players–in particular Berle, Gilford, and Buono, only 29 at the time–do what they do best in front of the camera.
I first saw this film on network TV in the early ’70s when I was 11 or 12, and a recent re-watch for this blog had me laughing just as hard as I did back then at some of the same scenes. Anyone who enjoys a great “caper movie” where everything falls into place should check this one out to see what happens when it doesn’t. Fun Fact: Over $3,000,000 in actual $100 bills–always accompanied by armed guards–was loaned by Bank of America to Columbia Pictures for shooting. As for the printing scenes, the currency was made larger than actual money and with deliberate errors so it couldn’t be passed as the real thing.