The Great McGinty

The conventional wisdom on McGINTY is that it's lesser Sturges, more important as his directorial debut than as a standalone comedy. Pish and tosh. This is a supremely satisfying comedy and had it been Sturges' only directing credit, would still mark him as a filmmaker to remember. (And, no, that's not a subtle swipe at his others, merely a defense of this too-often overlooked movie.)Maybe the best asset of McGINTY is its budget constraint, which steered Sturges towards the 'ensemble' casting which would become one of his hallmarks. The movie is filled stem to stern with sharp-eyed turns by primarily supporting players (including the leads, Donlevy & Tamiroff, who are excellent). What I can't help but notice is how the Sturges films of the 40s are really the last gasp of the great breakneck comedies of the pre-Code 30s, just prior to the 'screwball' era, when Hollywood was still allowed to poke fun at people/institutions/conventions of the Real World. In fact, McGINTY -with only minor casting changes- would have fit right in with the Warner Bros/First National bumper crop of fast, cynical comedies of '31-'34. (And, by the way, Tamiroff's cheerfully corrupt and malapropping Boss would be paid hilarious homage 20+ years later in animation form as Boris Badinov in Jay Ward's ROCKY & BULLWINKLE cartoons.) The love interest of Muriel Angelus, and adjoining subplot, may come off a bit treacly, but Sturges was canny enough to make this studio-mandated mawkishness an integral part of the plot...even as early as 1940, he was subverting True Love to his devilishly satiric purposes! So stop nitpicking and thoroughly enjoy one of the great American comedies, brought to unforgettable life by that great if unrecognized repertory company, The Sturges Players (featuring, among others, Wm Demarest, Thurston Hall & Arthur Hoyt).

The Great McGinty grabbed me with its verve and jaunty iconoclasm from the beginning. "This is the story of two men who met in a banana republic. One of them never did anything dishonest in his life except for one crazy minute. The other never did anything honest in his life except for one crazy minute. They both had to get out of the country." In McGinty, a guy on the outs votes for a politician something like 72 times, and for this he is rewarded with a political boss's favor--"The Boss," and what a boss. Akim Tamiroff is simply wonderful: "Where you get that horse blanket?" And: "What a wonderful opportunity. This state needs everything. ... We'll need - you'll kiss me for this - a new dam. ... 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. ..." As the lead, "The Boss's" counterpart and equal, it's Brian Donlevy as he never had been before, never was again. McGinty (and Sturge's second movie, Christmas in July) may not quite be up there in the stratosphere with his absolute best like The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, or Unfaithfully Yours, but they are nevertheless both wonderful movies with the Sturges stamp of buoyant uniqueness.

Preston Sturges couldn't get any studio interested in doing his "Story of a Man," nor could he even get it published when it was retitled "Biography of a Bum," so he offered it to Paramount for $10 on condition he could direct it. It was an offer the studio bosses couldn't refuse and it paved the way for other writers, such as John Huston, to take control of their own work by directing its film production. The script, which won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, has some extremely funny moments, with almost all of them involving Akim Tamiroff, who steals the movie as "The Boss," the man who pulls the political strings in the entire state. He is the perfect counterpoint to the rather bland Brian Donlevy, who is in the title role, as a bum who votes thirty seven times in an election for mayor to get the two dollars per vote. This makes a deep impression on Tamiroff, who likes his chutzpa, and eventually runs him for alderman, then mayor, and finally governor. The pace of the film is slow at its start, but picks up when Donlevy starts his story (in flashback) until he's elected mayor, and then slows down again. The condition that he marry to win any election begins his downfall, because he marries his secretary, Muriel Angelus, who wants him to do great things and eliminate the graft in politics. Although it's a marriage of convenience, he falls in love and wants to please her. And you see what she means when Tamiroff is all smiles as he says, greeting the new governor: "What a wonderful opportunity. This state needs everything. ... We'll need - you'll kiss me for this - a new dam. ... 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. ..." The level of writing is first rate, but I wish there were no flashbacks in the screenplay construction, since you know how it ends from the start. I've always felt the flashback construction in nine out of ten films is detrimental to their enjoyment. The supporting cast includes William Demarest, who has the classic line "If you didn't have graft, you'd have a lower class of people in politics!" Muriel Angelus was and is a relatively unknown actress who quit making movies after 1940. Sturges had severe budget constraints and couldn't use high salaried actors, which would have benfited the film.

In his debut as a director Preston Sturges turned in one of the brightest political satires ever done for the cinema in The Great McGinty. Sturges allegedly got the idea for the film and the various scenes therein from talking to a judge from Chicago who filled them in one the various shenanigans pulled there back in the day and still being pulled in some parts of the USA.

Preston Sturges though he had a successful Broadway play, The Good Fairy, and had written several sparkling screenplays for Paramount, the moguls that ran Paramount were a bit uneasy about giving him his own film to direct as well as act. The Great McGinty was a B film when it was released, playing the lower half of double features. It had a competent cast of players, but none of them you could say were big box office.

Imagine the surprise the following year when The Great McGinty won an Oscar for Preston Sturges, not for directing, but for Best Original Screenplay in 1940. The Great McGinty returned a tidy profit for a film they had not spent all that much money on. Sturges was given greater autonomy and control after that and for the next four years turned out a series of comedy classics with much larger budgets. But he was in constant warfare with the money people at Paramount for the rest of the time he was there.

The film is told in flashback as Brian Donlevy as a philosophical bartender tells a distraught Louis Jean Heydt his life story after preventing Heydt from shooting himself. There both in an unnamed South American country without extradition to the USA.

Donlevy was the epitome of the American dream as Preston Sturges sees the American dream. In Sturges's view any bum with nerve enough to seize opportunity before him, there's no telling how far he can go in America.

When we meet Donlevy he's exactly that, a hobo. He's on a soup line and ready to earn a few bucks by being a repeat voter for some people who for one reason or other are still on the voting rolls, but just can't make it to the polls. By earning $74.00 a vote by voting 37 times at $2.00 a vote, he comes to the attention of boss Akim Tamiroff.

Though they are immediate antagonists, Tamiroff sees potential in Donlevy and he begins a great political career and then has a very big fall.

Preston Sturges was starting to assemble his stock company of players who were in most of his films at Paramount, like William Demarest, Jimmy Conlin, Robert Grieg, etc. Although Sturges was only at Paramount for four years his stock company rivaled that of John Ford for that brief period.

Seen 67 years after its debut, The Great McGinty is a fresh as the day it was first made. It's dated in that the political bosses like Akim Tamiroff are not what they used to be in the age of information. Still though the ethics or lack thereof are still present in the age of television and the internet.

In his golden five years 1940-44, Preston Sturges was the writer & director for eight movies for Paramount, ALL GOOD and MOST of them BRILLIANT.

I first came to know these movies when five of them were shown on the BBC at Christmas in the early 1990's, including my personal favourites 'The Lady Eve' and 'The Palm Beach Story'. Since then I have had to wait for the invention of the DVD, and then last year's Preston Sturges DVD box set, when at last I could check out the other three.

Of those three, 'The Great McGinty' was the first movie to be "Written & Directed by Preston Sturges", and has to go into the GOOD rather than the BRILLIANT category. But for his first such project to be so good has got to be seen as a brilliant achievement for Sturges. I know how long he had to wait, and how hard he had to bargain to get that opportunity. He knew he had to succeed, not in his own terms but in those of his bosses at Paramount. In other words he had to bring in an economical movie that was conventional enough to be popular with audiences and critics alike.

The lead, Brian Donleavy plays McGinty as quite a straight character who has comic moments in set pieces with other players. The best comedy of the movie probably comes from Bill Demarest as "the Politician" and especially Akim Tamiroff as "the Boss", who drives the movie and its plot along, as he pushes McGinty and his career forward.

The second movie in the Preston Sturges golden period would be 'Christmas in July', again not one of his brilliant best, but beginning to include more of the lunacy and eccentric characters of a true Preston Sturges movie. By the time of his third project 'The Lady Eve', Sturges would be at the top of his form and the top of his art, and 'The Great McGinty' has to be seen not only as a good movie in itself, but as the first step in that direction.