Oscar Profiles: Edmund Gwenn in Mister 880 (1950)

Best Supporting Actor nomination 1950
Lost to George Sanders in All About Eve

Edmund Gwenn, in the title role of a kindly neighborhood junk collector and amateurish counterfeiter of $1 bills, comes across as a force of pure, if distracted, good, and although the result is a nice performance, it's not nearly as interesting as it could have been. Gwenn's "Skipper" Miller, known to the frustrated Secret Service as Mister 880, after the case number assigned to him, is a neighborhood saint, do-gooder, friend to children and animals, and only incidentally a criminal who makes obvious counterfeits on a home printing press (they're so bad that "Washington" is spelled "Wahsington"). Gwenn's decision to play every scene in the same friendly but absentminded manner provides one genuinely surprising moment, when Burt Lancaster (the star, a Secret Service agent assigned to the case) finally catches him: he acknowledges his crime and seems somewhat eager to get the prosecution over with, but there aren't any layers here. He comes across as a bit addled, if anything, in his eagerness to help the feds and his refusal to defend himself or avoid prison—"I'm sure there are a lot of nice people there," he says to the judge—but I'm not sure he was supposed to be addled. Honestly, it seemed like he was playing a Santa Claus who happened to make funny money. Walter Huston was chosen to play Mr. 880 but died before filming began, and I can only wish that he had survived long enough to give this role some real conflict, a sense that Skipper gets some devilish enjoyment out of passing bad counterfeits, a hint that something more than near-sainthood or senility was driving his eagerness to be punished.

Previous Oscar-nominated performance profiles: Diane Lane, Maggie McNamara, Jane Alexander, and Eleanor Parker