The Great McGinty (1940)

The Great McGinty is an American film comedy first released in 1940, directed by Preston Sturges.  The film stars Brian Donlevy, Muriel Angelus, Akim Tamiroff, Allyn Joslyn and William Demarest.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Weary of his exile in a seedy banana republic, a crooked banker is about to kill himself when a friendly barman intervenes and begins to recount his own sad story.  Many years ago, during the depression of the 1930s, Dan McGinty was a penniless down-and-out.  His luck changed on the day he was offered two dollars to vote in the place of a dead man in a mayoral election.  Instead of voting once, he voted 37 times, which so impressed his paymaster – a gangland chief known as The Boss – that he was tasked with collecting funds in a protection racket.  As a reward for his services, McGinty was made a candidate in the next mayoral election, which, with a little help from The Boss, he won easily – although he did have to marry his secretary to get the women’s vote.   With criminals lining his pockets, there seemed to be no limit to how far McGinty’s career would go.  But then, one tragic day, he acquired a luxury no man in his position could ever afford – a conscience...

This hilarious satire on American politics was the film that launched the short but stunning directorial career of Preston Sturges, regarded as one of the few genuine auteurs in Hollywood in the 1940s.   Sturges started out as a playwright, scoring a number of major hits on Broadway before getting work as a screenwriter in the 1930s.  By the end of the decade, he had become the most highly paid writer in Hollywood – credited with successes such as Diamond Jim (1935) and Easy Living (1937) – with a temperament to match.  He was frustrated and angered by the way in which writers were treated in relation to film directors.  Sturges wrote the screenplay for The Great McGinty in 1932 but failed to find a company to make the film.  In the end, he sold it to Paramount Pictures for just one dollar, on the condition that he directed the film.  It was the bargain of the century.

The Great McGinty is a supremely enjoyable satirical comedy, not as sophisticated as Sturges’s subsequent films, but brimming with laugh-out-loud slapstick and wonderfully tongue-in-cheek comic dialogue.  It is also quite a subversive film.  A parody of the rags-to-riches story, it sends up not just the American political system but the whole notion of the American dream.  McGinty’s spectacular ascent of the greasy pole is fuelled by corruption and self-interest, and is followed by an even faster descent as soon as he tries to go straight.  The similarities with real-life politics are not too hard to see.  It is not honesty that makes a man rich in this world.

Sturges’s direction is as inspired and as slick as his writing, his approach having something of the maturity and madness of other great directors of film farce, such as Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder.  Typically, Sturges avoids making any strong moral point.  As he makes clear in his later film Sullivan’s Travels (1941), his belief was that preaching should be left to the preachers.  His characters act as they do not because they are inherently good or bad, but in a way that reflects the experiences that life has thrown at them.   Unlike some of his contemporaries, Sturges had no particular axe to grind.  He merely wants us to laugh with him at the mad, mad world in which we live.  It’s a nice philosophy: if you can’t change it, plonk a big red nose on it and guffaw – then somehow things don’t seem quite so bad...

© James Travers 2008

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