Preston Sturges (1940)
The Great McGinty is a satire of machine politics. Preston Sturges’s script, which evolved over several years (and through several titles), aimed also to show, according to Sturges, ‘that honesty is as disastrous for a crook as is knavery for the cashier of a bank’. Although a twenty-first century audience can’t experience the political comedy in the film as daringly cynical, the satire is often sharp and bracing – and it’s consistently entertaining. The moral of Sturges’s story is relatively disappointing in the telling.
The eponymous hero realises the American Dream at speed. Dan McGinty is a tramp, standing in a line at a soup kitchen, when, like others in the queue there, he’s offered a two-dollar bribe to vote under a false name in a rigged mayoral election. He votes thirty-seven times, in different precincts, and earns $74. His initiative comes to the attention of a local political boss, who takes McGinty on as a collector for the protection racket he runs in the city. (Sturges described The Vagrant, as The Great McGinty was originally known, as set in the ‘mythical city of Chicago in the imaginary state of Illinois’.) Although he and the (unnamed) boss argue with each other from the word go, McGinty subsequently becomes the boss’s political protégé and, when public disapproval of the chicanery of local politics is running high, the ‘reform candidate’ in a new mayoral election. A credible candidate must have a wife; McGinty doesn’t want one but agrees to wed his secretary Catherine, a divorced mother of two young children, in a mutually agreed marriage of convenience. He’s duly elected mayor and Catherine is always, in public, at his side.
Under the supervision of the boss, McGinty continues the corrupt traditions of the mayoral office and eventually stands for election as state governor. By now, things are getting more complicated. McGinty has fallen in love with Catherine and begun to listen to her idealistic views about public service. When he wins the governorship, McGinty wants to part company with the boss, politically and actually, and tells him so. The boss, after threatening to reveal McGinty’s own corruption, fires a gun at him – in the governor’s mansion, on the governor’s inauguration day and with the press therefore on hand to take plenty of photographs of the fracas. We next see McGinty and the boss in neighbouring jail cells. Before their case comes to trial, the boss arranges an escape for them both. En route to a new life in a new location, McGinty phones Catherine to tell her where he’s hidden a cache of money that will leave her and her children well provided for.
McGinty’s meteoric rise and fall are described in a flashback that comprises most of the film’s eighty-three minutes. The story is bookended and, just once, punctuated by scenes in a club in an unidentified banana republic. McGinty now works there as a bartender. The opening sequence features principally his polar opposite, referred to in the above quote from Preston Sturges. This is Tommy Thompson, the bank employee who made a good, respectable living until the ‘one crazy minute’ of dishonesty that lost him his wife, children and career, and sent him too to the banana republic. Tommy now props up the bar that McGinty tends. The Great McGinty was the first film that Sturges directed and he proved to be a remarkably quick learner: Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story all appeared within the next two years and three months. Compared with the two of these that I’ve so far seen, however, the pacing of The Great McGinty is uncertain and the performances in it are mostly inferior to those in Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story. Both these shortcomings are evident in that introductory sequence, which is sluggish and features uninspired acting from Louis Jean Haydt (Tommy) and Steffi Duna (a dancer in the club). The same problems recur, less blatantly but more significantly, in the narrative proper, especially when Sturges moves into McGinty’s private life.
As McGinty, Brian Donlevy is relatively charismatic when he first appears behind the bar. Since he’s sharing the screen with Louis Jean Haydt and Steffi Duna, this might seem to be damning with faint praise but Donlevy remains an imposing, likeable presence throughout. He’s not very flexible, though, and does little to express McGinty’s falling in love and increasing unease about being a crook and a public servant at the same time. In the later stages, Donlevy’s best bit comes when McGinty is telling a bedtime story to Catherine’s children: they’ve fallen asleep but he insists on reading aloud through to the end to find out what happens. This quiet, surprising moment is funny and charming but Donlevy’s lack of variation is a problem at more crucial points. McGinty’s farewell phone call to his wife – in which he makes a rueful but convinced admission that ‘you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear’ – lacks impact.
Catherine is played by Muriel Angelus, who’s a good enough comedienne. I liked the moment when Catherine, immediately after the service to solemnise the marriage-of-convenience, gives polite excuses for not attending her own wedding reception. Angelus too, though, shows little emotional range in the later, less light-hearted scenes. Akim Tamiroff plays the political boss with verve and it’s probably Preston Sturges’s intentions rather than Tamiroff’s limitations that turn the boss’s every appearance into the same routine. He and McGinty are at each other’s throats wherever they happen to be. The boss turns up again in the closing sequence, back in the banana republic bar, where their brawling resumes. This running joke isn’t as funny as you might expect from Sturges. The star turn in the supporting cast is Arthur Hoyt, as the mild-mannered Mayor Wilfred H Tillinghurst, whose dodgy re-election strategy starts McGinty’s journey from hoboism to high office.
9 February 2016
