Ron Feinberg | Through the Shattered Lens

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.

(Nearly every Saturday night, the Late Night Movie Gang and I watch a movie. On January 20th, we watched the 1975 science fiction satire, A Boy and His Dog.)

A Boy and His Dog begins, quite literally, with a bang. A bang followed by a mushroom cloud. And then a second mushroom cloud. And then another. And another. When the explosions finally stop, we are informed that World War IV only lasted five days. Of course, it destroyed most of society. The year is now 2024 and … well, things aren’t great.

(For those of you keeping track, that means we’ve got another six years left. Enjoy them!)

The world is now a barren wasteland, an endless stretch of desert. There are a handful of survivors but they’re not exactly the types who you would want to survive an apocalypse. Take Vic, for instance. Vic (played by Don Johnson) is an absolute moron. He can’t read. He’s not very good at thinking. He has no conscience. He’s someone who kills and rapes without giving it a second thought. When Vic isn’t scavenging for food and supplies, he’s obsessing on sex. When we first meet him, the only thing redeeming about Vic is that almost everyone else in the world is even worse than he is.

That Vic has managed to survive for as long as he has is something of a minor miracle. Vic has been lucky enough to team up with a dog named Blood. Blood is not only surprisingly intelligent but he’s also telepathic. Unfortunately, the same experiment that granted him telepathy also caused him to lose his instinct as a hunter. So, Blood and Vic have an arrangement. Vic keeps Blood supplied with food and Blood helps Vic track down women.

Blood’s voice is provided by actor Tim McIntire and, from the minute we first hear him, it becomes obvious that Blood may be cute on the outside but, on the inside, it’s a totally different story. Blood rarely has a good word for anyone or anything. He delights in annoying Vic, calling him “Albert” while still demanding that Vic get him food. He’s a surprisingly well-read dog but you wouldn’t necessarily want to get stuck in a kennel with him. Much as with Vic, Blood’s only redeeming trait is that everyone else is marginally worse than he is.

(Sadly, if there was an apocalypse like the one that starts this movie, most of the survivors probably would be like Vic. The only people who would survive something like that would be the people who were solely looking out for themselves.)

A Boy and His Dog is a highly episodic film, following Vic and Blood as they wander across the wasteland and bicker. They fight other scavengers. They spend a rather depressing night at a makeshift movie theater. Eventually, they come across a young woman named Quilla June (Suanne Benton). Blood dislikes her but Vic says he’s in love. (Mostly, he’s just excited that he’s now having sex regularly.) Eventually, through a whole series of events, Vic discovers an underground city named Topeka, where everyone wears clown makeup. The head of the town (Jason Robards) informs Vic that his sperm will be used to impregnate 35 women. Vic is excited until he finds out that reproduction in Topeka is a matter of artificial insemination.

(Both the wasteland and Topeka are nightmarish in their own different ways. The wasteland is world without morality or compassion. Topeka is a world where everyone looks like a mime, there’s always a marching band, and order is maintained by a robot wearing overalls.)

Of course, while Vic is dealing with life underground, Blood waits above ground. By the end of the film, Vic is forced to make a choice between settling down or remaining loyal to his dog. It all leads to a final comment from Blood that will either make you laugh or throw a shoe at your TV. I did both.

A Boy and His Dog is a strange movie. It definitely isn’t for everyone. It’s a comedy but the humor is pitch black. Still, that strangeness — along with the talent of the dog playing Blood and Tim McIntire’s savagely sarcastic voice work — is what makes the film watchable. There’s literally no other film like A Boy and His Dog. By the time Vic ends up in Topeka, the film has become almost a fever dream of apocalyptic paranoia and satire. The ultimate message of the film appears to be that the apocalypse would really suck so let’s try to not blow each other up.

Who can’t get behind that?