Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1973’s Money To Burn!  It  can be viewed on YouTube.

For someone who has spent the past few years in prison, Jed Finnegan (E.G. Marshall) sure is a nice old man!  He runs the prison print shop and all of the other prisoners love him.  The guards trust him.  The warden (David Doyle) is really impressed with Jed’s watercolors and is interested in helping Jed launch a career as an artist after he gets out of prison.  Every weekend, Jed’s wife, Emily (Mildred Natwick), comes up to the prison with a picnic basket and she has lunch with her husband.  Jed admits that his wife is not a particularly good cook but it’s obvious that he really looks forward to her visits.

Emily’s sweet nature keeps a lot of people from noticing that she is just as cunning and clever a criminal as Jed ever was.  She knows that Jed had printed up one million dollars in counterfeit bills and she is looking forward to helping him exchange the fake money for real money.  Jed’s plan is to steal the payroll of the local army base and just leave the fake money in place of the real money.  However, Jed’s been in prison for so long that he doesn’t know that the military no longer pays anyone in cash.  Everyone’s paying everyone by check!

(This film is very much from the 70s.  While Jed and Emily were shocked to discover that people were no longer being paid in cash, I was shocked to discover that they were being paid by check.)

Working with two recently released ex-cons (played by Cleavon Little and Alejandro Rey), Emily tries to find a new way to switch out the money.  She discovers that there’s an incinerator nearby where the government burns the currency that it no longer needs.  But it won’t be easy to break in and make sure that the right money get burned….

And that’s not even mentioning the trouble of getting the fake money out of the prison in the first place!

Money to Burn is likable mix of comedy and (very mild) action.  It’s a film about criminals but they’re very likable criminals who go out of their way not to hurt people.  Emily is even happy about the idea of not only stealing a million dollars but also helping the government out by taking the old currency off their hands.  Marshall, Natwick, Little, and Rey all give such warm and cheerful performances that you can’t help but hope that they get away with their scheme.  The film, which deftly balances comedy and drama, clocks in at a brisk 73 minutes and it has an absolutely wonderful twist ending.  This is definitely a heist film that deserves to be better known.