Who's Minding the Mint?

When an employee of the Bureau of Engraving accidentally walks out with $50,000 and carelessly flushes it down his garbage disposal, he has to come up with a scheme to break into the building and replace the money.

Hollywood in the sixties produced a series of gargantuan blockbuster comedies featuring the best available comedic talent on their books. It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World kick started the trend in 1963, followed by Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and The Great Race, both in 1965. Whether the audience simply dried up or the cost of such extravaganzas became prohibitive, by the end of the decade the trend had run its course and Hollywood went looking for a new idea, which it found in the gargantuan blockbuster disaster film, courtesy of The Poseidon Adventure.

In the interim there was Who’s Minding the Mint?, which takes its cue from It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World in gathering together a disparate collection of people whose greed overcomes their common sense.

Jim Hutton heads the cast as Harry Lucas, who believes the bag he is carrying out the door is full of inedible fudge made by co-worker Verna Baxter. Hutton is a pleasant actor who moves the plot along while everyone else provides the gags and laughs. According to the IMDB, the press once described him as the heir apparent to James Stewart and Jack Lemmon. If so, he was a very lightweight heir.



Dorothy Provine is Verna Baxter, who has eyes for Harry and doesn’t realize her fudge is lethal. A popular actress from the late fifties to the mid-seventies, she never became a household name like Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore, despite a string of television series and roles in major theatrical films like The Great Race and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Verna adds a touch of reality to a totally farcical situation and keeps the movie from totally evaporating into thin air. She was one of the most beautiful actresses of the decade. Prior to Who’s Minding the Mint? she appeared in Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, a terrible, unfunny Bond spoof. It is unfortunate that her full range was never tested in a solid dramatic role.



Pop Gillis (Walter Brennan), a former printer at the Bureau is enlisted to run the presses and shows up with a pregnant Basset hound that decides it needs to give birth at an inappropriate moment.



Safe cracker Avery Dugan (Jack Gilford) agrees to accept $2,000 to open the safe where the plates are stored. Dugan intends to go straight when he gets out of prison but needs money in the meantime. However, there is a problem. He is nearly deaf and will need a hearing aid. Gilford nearly walks away with the movie.



Avaricious pawn shop owner Luther Burton (Milton Berle) discovers the caper while selling Dugan the hearing aid and blackmails Harry into getting in on the action. He can provide all kinds of extras they may need, including postage.



Ralph Randazzo (Joey Bishop) needs money to pay his gambling debts and he knows how to navigate the sewer system that will get them into the basement of the Bureau.



The sewers are deep and they will need a boat. Ralph has the perfect man to build one, The Captain (Victor Buono), who turns out to be Captain of a children’s ride in an amusement park.



You want to put my boat in a sewer? For $2,000, he has a quick change of heart. Victor Buono delivers a superb comic performance.



\Ralph hires his cousin Mario to serve as lookout and threatens to back out of the deal if Harry refuses. Unfortunately, Mario doesn’t speak a word of English. Jamie Farr made his film debut in Blackboard Jungle and was only a couple of years away from television immortality in Mash.





Harry learns that an audit will take place the following Monday. In the emergency change of plans, he rounds up the crew, who show up in inappropriate attire for a criminal undertaking.



There is no disguising the low budget for this movie which is on the level of a television show. Despite its flaws, it is a sweetly innocent film, the last of its kind and the passing of a generation of great comedians. All things considered, not a bad way to go out.



The only known movie featuring a Bassett hound in scuba gear.



Howard Morris, one of the great comedy writers and performers of the fifties and sixties briskly directs a fast paced script from R.S Allen and Harvey Bullock. While it isn’t a laugh out loud movie, it will have you smiling.