• The Great McGinty

8/3/24 (Sat)

A goofy political satire of 1940 by Preston Sturges, who apparently sold his Oscar-winning script to Paramount for $10 in exchange for letting him direct. Its relative success paved the way for the great Sturges films to come.

The city’s sleazy Boss offers money to a bum named McGinty to vote for the incumbent mayor. When the brazen McG manages to vote 37 times, the Boss is impressed and hires him as a debt collector. McG’s ability to squeeze the money out of people with a mix of sweet talk and threats leads to further promotion to alderman, mayor and ultimately, after a marriage of convenience, to governor, but all under the sway of the big Boss. When the bum-cum-governor pushes things too far, he discovers that the system is bigger than he is.

A framework of McG as a bartender in a banana republic reminiscing on his past seems unnecessary other than setting up a joke in the film’s final 15 seconds. We never do hear the back story from a drunk who tried early in the film to kill himself, making me wonder what he was doing there in the first place.

McGinty never wanted to marry or have children, but having been forced to wed for political reasons, he of course falls in love with his wife. That was predictable from the moment the woman suggested the ploy, but it was carried off well enough. The wife turns out to have two children from a previous marriage, who somehow become close to the bum who has come into their lives. He has a nice scene where he is reading them a bedtime story; even as they fall asleep in his arms, he keeps reading to learn the ending. Naturally the wife insists that he reject the graft that launched him to success, which leads quickly to his downfall. The story has him parting from her forever when he escapes jail and heads to refuge in Latin America, with only a brief phone call to say goodbye. What exactly happens to the wife and kids? Having built the romance, the director could have done better than this.

The comedy was too broad to be a true satiric classic, and it veers to the conventional with the romantic sideline. Still, the exchanges between the Boss and bum, both verbal and physical, were always entertaining. The dialogue offered some great exchanges:

“You think a dam is something you put a lot of water in. A dam is something you put a lot of concrete in. And it doesn’t matter how much you put in there’s always room for a lot more.”

“Some people is too lazy to vote, that’s all. They don’t like this kind of weather. Some of ’em is sick in bed and can’t vote. Maybe a couple of ’em croaked recently. That ain’t no reason why Mayor Tillinghast should get cheated out of their support.”

“If it wasn’t for graft, you’d get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish.” “Especially since you can’t rob the people anyway.” “How was that?” “What you rob, you spend, and what you spend goes back to the people. So, where’s the robbery? I read that in one of my father’s books.” “That book should be in every home.”

The best thing about the film was the cast. Brian Donlevy was not overly exciting but good enough as McGinty, and Muriel Angelus was lovely as his wife in her last major screen role (Richard Rodgers apparently tried to lure her out of retirement to play the Mother Abbess in the original The Sound of Music). But the movie really lit up with two actors who became Sturges regulars: the irrepressible Akim Tamiroff as the Boss (reportedly the model for Bullwinkle’s Boris Badenov) and the gruff-as-ever William Demerest as part of the political machine.

The film is not Sturges’ best by a long shot and could have been more biting, though that may be a function of studio politics at the time. Still, it’s a fun romp.