The Great McGinty

“If you don’t have graft, you’d have a low type of person in politics. Men with no ambition.”

Dan McGinty’s record-breaking efforts at repeat voting (at $2 a pop) commend him to big city boss Akim Tamiroff, who runs “The Machine,” a term that would have been familiar to everyone back in 1940 and which might be due a comeback. Eventually installed as state governor, complete with a pre-selected bride (his secretary), McGinty makes the mistake of falling in love with his honest wife. Her virtue will be his ruination.

Related in flashback, Preston Sturges’ classic is an omnivorous satire on corruption and marked his intentions to bring dramatic realism into American comedy. Sturges was a well-established screenwriter by the late 30s and — perhaps inspired by Orson Welles’ deal at RKO — sold this script for $10 in return for the privilege of directing it himself. (Billy Wilder and John Huston would follow suit soon afterwards.) Over the next 12 months he would write and direct three more, including the indelible The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels, a significant influence on the Coen Brothers’s Barton Fink. Still, the purpose of today’s screening is to remind us that electoral corruption goes back a long ways.

Capra with the gloves off.

Raymond Durgnat

Ladies and gentlemen and registered voters of this fair metropolis, here is a picture which really captures the rowdy spirit of corrupt politics, which makes titanic sport of the brazen peculations of grafting opportunists and which reflects by innuendo the indifference of the American “sucker” […] There was a time—and that not so long ago—when such good-natured elbow-rubbing, even upon the screen, with crooked political bosses, ward-heelers and profligate officios might not have been so amusing for the local constituents. But now, with graver matters to concern us and with a more comfortable sense of civic security, it is sublimely easy to laugh at the shameless tricks and vulgarities of out-and-out political buccaneers.

Bosley Crowther, New York Times