Tag Archives: Preston Sturges film

The Great McGinty

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  • 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.

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Unfaithfully Yours

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  • Unfaithfully Yours

10/5/23 (Thurs)

Unfunnily Yours is more like it. Preston Sturges’ 1948 film was apparently his last critical success after a string of flops, though it was a commercial failure at the time. That was partly due to the untimely suicide of Rex Harrison’s real-life suffering mistress, which creepily paralleled one of the plot points, and the studio didn’t help things by shifting strategy and advertising the black comedy as a thriller. It’s been reevaluated since and appears on many lists of best-ever comedies; it’s one of Tarantino’s 11 favorite films. Not on mine.

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