Summary
In a city that smells of ink and fear, a single forged banknote—its linen swapped for the shaved pelt of a mongrel—slips through the fingers of a sweating clerk and begins its corrosive pilgrimage. Under the gas-jets of a detective bureau that operates like a spider in a bottle, we watch ledger-men clock the heartbeat of every plain-clothes phantom sent to haunt the alleys; a wall-map bristles with pins that quiver like trapped moths. The narrative then shears off into the bruise-colored slums where a desperate runner, stomach folding on itself, tries to palm the silkless paper; a bullet kisses his coat, the city exhales sour smoke, and he limps toward the only mendicant monarch who still mints nightmares in candlewax and dog-hair. The kingpin, a man whose pupils are minted coins, greets the wounded courier with a razor smile, then with a razor itself; the carcass is tamped into a rum barrel, rolled to the pier, and dropped where the tide keeps its secrets. Only a scruffy Irish terrier—coat mangled in deliberate mimicry of the counterfeit texture—survives, nose to the wind, scratching back through plank and shadow to the detective whose hunches are stitched with pity. Together, man and beast retrace the scent of treachery, descending into the counterfeiter’s lair just as another blade glints toward canine vertebrae. Steel flashes, siren yelps, and the king of forgers is clapped into bracelets; morning finds an empty cell, a wink from a secret-service mole, and a dog curled at the foot of a new master who hopes loyalty can be re-minted like silver.
Synopsis
This short film concerns the trailing of a counterfeiter to his haunts, and his eventual arrest. The story opens in the offices of the detective bureau, and shows the method by which headquarters keeps track of its men. The scene then shifts to a narrow street in the slums, where a man who tries to pass a counterfeit bill is given a run by the police, and is wounded and finally evades them, finding shelter at the headquarters of the master counterfeiter. When he appeals to the counterfeiter to go and get him a doctor, he is killed for his pains, placed in a barrel and dropped over the edge of the pier under the cloak of night. The little Irish terrier who appears with patches of hair clipped from his coat, suggesting the origin of the hair used in place of silk in the counterfeit notes, scratches his way out of the den in search of his master. Detective Arnold, discovering the dog sitting on the side of the pier looking into the water, finally locates the body of the dead man in the barrel. He orders a truckman to drive out of sight with the barrel, and the counterfeiter's den is easily found by following the dog, who goes back to where he believes his master has returned. Arnold gains admission while the counterfeiter is off his guard, arriving in time to save the dog from meeting the same fate as his master. The police, notified by messenger, reach the scene in short time, the counterfeiter along with Arnold is taken into custody. The next morning an empty cell greets the guard, who is then made aware of the fact that Arnold is a secret service man and not a criminal. The dog finds a home with the detective, who expresses the hope that he may be as faithful to him as he was to his former master.
Moving Picture World, March 13, 1920
Review Excerpt
"
A scrap of paper, shaved dog, and a city that never sleeps on honesty—Wilson Mizner’s only surviving studio scenario still snarls a century later.
Picture the year 1920: Prohibition has just buttoned the nation’s mouth shut, paper money is still exotic enough to feel erotic, and the movies—those jittery nickelodeon sacraments—have begun to flirt with the criminal underbelly instead of merely sermonising from it. Into that hinge-decade sidles The Silkless Bank Note, a one-reel fever dream shot..."
