The Great McGinty

 A down-at-the-heels bum, Dan McGinty (played by Brian Donleavy) is shivering in the snow in a line for hand-outs at a Depression-era soup-kitchen.  He's hustled out of the queue and told that he can earn two-dollars if he votes for one of the candidates running for Mayor in the town.  McGinty is an enterprising crook and he manages to vote 37 times for the approved candidate.  When he presents his tab to the Boss (Akim Tamiroff), a mobster who is behind the mayoral candidate, there's a dispute about whether McGinty has actually earned his pay for the 37 fraudulent votes.  The gangster threatens him but McGinty isn't intimidated and, in fact, he slugs the Boss in the face.  The Boss is favorably impressed by McGinty's nerve and recruits him for his criminal undertakings.  This leads to series of events in which McGinty first wins an election for Mayor and, then, becomes governor of the State.  This is the premise for Preston Sturges' 1940 political satire The Great McGinty, an extremely witty but also strangely discomfiting film.  

The legend around Sturges' direction of this film, his maiden effort, is that he bartered the script to Paramount in exchange for the right to direct the movie.  (The story exists in several inconsistent versions which suggests to me that it is apocryphal.  Sturges was already a legendary screenwriter in Hollywood and had been famous since The Power and the Glory, one of his scripts turned into a Spencer Tracy vehicle in 1933. Several of his other scripts had resulted in very profitable films, notably Easy Living in 1937 and, so, it seems unlikely that Paramount didn't know Sturges' potential when he directed The Great McGinty.)  The Great McGinty was a success, won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and led to Paramount engaging the director to make an additional eight films -- almost all of them very successful, box-office dynamite, and regarded as among the best movies made in Hollywood during the decade of the forties.  (These films include Sullivan's Travels, The Lady Eve, and the two war-time comedies The Miracle at Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero!)  Within a couple years of the debut of The Great McGinty, Preston Sturges was third most highly paid man in the United States.

Sturges liked elaborate narrative structures and The Great McGinty begins in a sleazy saloon in the tropics, a "Banana Republic" a prefatory title tells us.  A drunk staggers around the bar in the company of a cabaret singer with not one but three hibiscus blossoms in her hair.  The man is morose and, apparently, tries to kill himself in the tavern's toilet.  The bartender stops him from harming himself and, then, seats the drunk at the bar with the chanteuse.  The drunk says that he's suicidal because of his fall from grace -- "I was once a bank president," the guy proclaims.  The bartender says that being a bank president is nothing -- "I was the governor of a State," he tells the singer and the drunk.  This precipitates a flash-back to the Depression and bum waiting in line at the soup kitchen in a city that seems to be similar to Chicago.  With several interpolations back to the saloon in the tropics, the story proceeds to show "dapper Dan McGinty" rose to be first Mayor of the city and, then, governor of the State.  Everything proceeds at breakneck pace -- the movie with all of its flashbacks and complicated action is only 82 minutes long.  

McGinty distinguishes himself collecting debts on behalf of the Boss.  (He operates mostly by persuasion and kindness but isn't afraid to bludgeon deadbeats into submission.)  The Boss admires McGinty's aplomb and, when the previous Mayor gets into a scandal and is indicted, he persuades his lieutenant (now involved in bribery and kickbacks for big governmental franchises) to run for Mayor.  Since women have the vote and are, now, expected to be an important part of the electorate, the Boss tells McGinty to get married since women "don't like bachelors."  McGinty's attractive secretary agrees to participate in a "marriage of convenience" and "in name only" so that the political candidate can appear before the voters as a married man.   Of course, the viewer immediately understands that the secretary will be McGinty's love interest in the film.  This woman is liberated -- she was previously married and lives with her Black maid, a dachshund, and two children in a nice apartment.  McGinty is surprised to discover that his wife has a previous family but, in fact, he comes to love the two children.  Nonetheless, McGinty is cheerfully corrupt and works with the Boss to steal as much money as possible from the City.  (McGinty's wife says that her father has written an economics book on the thesis that no corruption can possibly harm the people -- bribes are just injected back into the money circulating in the city and so graft doesn't do injury to anyone.  This may be her justification for falling in love with McGinty -- after all, his corruption, which enriches her, doesn't really harm anyone.)  McGinty is so successful at running the City that the Boss demands that he stand for office for the governor of the State.  There is a wonderful and, even, inspiring (in a Capra-esque way) montage of William Demarest, the Boss' loyal factotum, and the other (opposing) candidate giving parallel speeches.  The other candidate, who seems to be a well-meaning conventional liberal, says that McGinty had hundreds of public buildings erected and that he enriched himself off them -- they are all "monuments to his graft"; Demarest cries "he made your city beautiful."  McGinty wins the election and moves into the governor's mansion.  His wife persuades him to adopt a reform policy -- he is going to abolish "child labor" and engage in urban renewal to clear out the tenements.  (McGinty, we learn, was a child laborer himself and didn't think it was all that bad -- the factory where he worked when he was seven was "light and airy", better than his apartment, and he was proud to earn four dollars a week to support his mother.)  Shortly after coming into office, the Boss appears and demands his recompense -- he orders McGinty to build a dam since you "can pour lots and lots concrete into a dam" and "don't ever have to finish it" and, even, if it is finished there will always be "crack" requiring more concrete.  The boss says that clearing the tenements would be a waste of time:  he argues that the people who live there like the squalor and, if you give them bathtubs, they "will just fill them up with coal."  McGinty, gripped with reformer's zeal, defies the Boos and there's a big fight in which the gangster tries to shoot him.  The Boss goes to jail, squeals on McGinty, and, so, the governor is arrested as well and thrown into the hoosegow in the cell next to the Boss.  William Demarest, playing the Boss' loyal henchmen, busts the two men out of jail and they flee through a snow- and thunderstorm.  McGinty calls his wife and tells her that he can't come home since this would shame her and the children.  He explains where she can find a key to a strong box in which he keeps his slush fund (his "dee-duct box" to quote Huey Long).  This brings us back to the saloon in the steamy tropics where we discover that Demarest and the Boss are also in the tavern -- Demarest is acting as a kind of bouncer and the Boss is presiding over gambling.  There's a quarrel and for the third or fourth time in the movie, McGinty and the Boss duke it out.  

The film is very funny, provides amusing and detailed information about the various criminal schemes (including election fraud) in which McGinty participates, and has astonishingly witty and aphoristic dialogue.  The picture is also handsomely produced -- the smoky barroom scenes in the Tropics look like von Sternberg and there are some very impressive deep focus shots that seem to presage photography in Orson Welles Citizen Kane.  (One sequence rotating around a large vase in the foreground and showing the governor's mansion is very beautiful and, when McGinty lights a candle that is reflected in the facets of a big chandelier overhead, the effects is poetic and lyrical.)  There are many indelible minor characters and, on all levels, the camerawork and acting is superior. When McGinty escapes from jail, the footage of the speeding car, obviously a cut-out inserted onto rear-projection screens displaying torrential rains or snow, have a surreal effect consistent with feeling in the film that things are running off the rails.  The ending is very disquieting and emotionally unresolved.  It's surprising that McGinty simply abandons his wife and her children, giving up on people he loves, to return to his life of cheerful and vicious corruption like a dog to vomit.  McGinty is simply too corrupt to reform and his epiphany that he should act to make the world a better place destroys him immediately.  The world, after all, doesn't want to be reformed.  It is the way it is.  The commentary track on the DVD, Samm Deignam, is generally inoffensive and somewhat inaccurate and she misreads the movie -- but she's right in invoking Bertolt Brecht as a reference.  Systems of corruption and exploitation are so deeply rooted in American politics as to be ineradicable.  Sturges' directs broadly and paints with a broad brush -- the movie is bigger than life; the bursts of slapstick that punctuate the movie are immensely loud and destructive and the film is filled with torchlight parades, political rallies, and huge banquet scenes, no doubt saliva-inducing to audiences at the end of the Great Depression.  I don't know if The Great McGinty is the best film ever made about American politics (as some critics proclaim) but it makes movies like All the King's Men seem more than a little naive and maudlin.