"This is the story of two men who met in a Banana Republic. One of them was HONEST all of his life except for one crazy minute. The other was DISHONEST all of his life except for one crazy minute," begins THE GREAT MCGINTY (1940). "They both had to get out of the Country!"

Did anyone ever have to know anything more than that to live in America?

Handsome as sin in his youth, with a mother who looked like Ava Gardner and danced for Isadora Duncan in Europe, Preston Sturges, the first modern film producer/writer/director, was the wittiest, most audacious, brilliant boy wonder of the late 1930's. And from 1940 to 1948, he was the most successful: THE GREAT MCGINTY, 1940; CHRISTMAS IN JULY, 1941; THE LADY EVE, 1941; THE PALM BEACH STORY, 1942; THE GREAT MOMENT, 1943; THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK, 1943; HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO, 1944; MAD WEDNESDAY, 1946; and UNFAITHFULLY YOURS, 1948.

Then, he made a bad picture . . . and he had to get out of the Country.

Raised mostly in France by his mother (who went by the name Mary Desti) and a succession of step-fathers, Sturges thrived on, and suffered from, that classic pull between the artistic and the commercial which we see in that other boy wonder, the younger Orson Welles. Sturges was related to the political dynasty of the Bidens of Delaware, but was given free creative rein and encouragement by his mother. A flier in World War I, he returned to invent, patent and manufacture one of the first kiss proof lipsticks. When he came to distribute it, however, he revealed the flaw that was to bring down all the boy wonders. He had little time for the details of running a successful business.

Fortunately for him, Sturges was able to thresh his way through a field of wealthy and beautiful young wives, most notably Eleanor Post Hutton, heiress to two huge fortunes. In that time, he wrote several successful Broadway plays and gravitated to Hollywood, where he crafted a series of winning screen plays (THE POWER AND THE GLORY, 1933; DIAMOND JIM, 1935; IF I WERE KING, 1939; REMEMBER THE NIGHT, 1940, etc.), which posed increasingly humorous questions about what satisfaction wealth and power brought people if they made themselves unhappy gaining and maintaining it all. In 1940, Sturges shrewdly manipulated a deal to write, direct, and to some degree, produce his own motion picture.

That picture was THE GREAT MCGINTY.

It begins with the epigraph quoted in my first paragraph, and moves to an establishing shot which shows we are in a smoky harbor bar in one of the ports of Central or South America. A masterful tracking shot follows a sexy Latina dancer (Steffi Duna) to a furtive, ill-looking man in an expensive, crumpled white tropical suit. The man (Louis Jean Heydt) is the head cashier of the Second National Bank of a small American city. He is not in this place on vacation.

After the dancer cosys up to the tall American and they have drinks, and he makes cryptic drunken remarks to her, he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. He needs help, and the dancer signals the bartender McGinty (Brian Donlevy) to take him in. McGinty has to stop the man from shooting himself, and when he has dragged him back out to the bar, the man and the dancer listen to a "if you think you've had it rough" story from McGinty.

In recurring flashbacks, we follow a down and out bum, Dan McGinty, in a city like Chicago, as he parlays voting fraud into a job as a mob enforcer, then alderman, to Mayor, and finally Governor of the State. All the way, he must reluctantly follow the orders of the Boss (Akim Tamiroff), including acquiring a wife of convenience, his secretary Sarah (Muriel Angelus). What neither he nor the Boss have calculated is that Sarah is a kind of mild mannered Erin Brokovich, with a family from a previous husband who has deserted her. McGinty falls first for the kids and then for Sarah, who persuades Governor Elect McGinty to step on the untrod path of honesty.

And that's why McGinty is a bartender in a broken down dive in the Tropics.

Brian Donlevy (in his first starring role) and the wonderfully ripe Tamiroff are supported by a group of actors who would form a sort of stock company in Sturges pictures: William Demarest, Jimmy Conlon, Allyn Joslyn , Arthur Hoyt, etc.

Be warned that, for all the zany, cynical, double entendred mirth of the writing and the story, for all the shrewd observations about American political life, and life in general, the film was made on very limited resources, pared to the bone at 82 minutes. And fledgling Director Sturgis, at this point, is more at ease with dialogue scenes than action ones. Nevertheless, this film is one of the first looks, albeit a humorous one, at how American Politics, especially Big City Politics, is run. (If I were a betting man, I would wager that it was here, and from this director, an old New York theatrical colleague, that Orson Welles got some of his ideas for CITIZEN KANE, 1941. Sturges is the kind of man Welles would have liked to be if he had had the time!)

THE GREAT MCGINTY was also the first of that greatest unrivaled run of successful satires in American Motion Pictures. Sturges went from strength to strength, leading lady to leading lady, fortune to fortune, until he exhausted himself, and made THE BEAUTIFUL BLONDE FROM BASHFUL BEND (1949). That was the end. It was a bomb! He had to move from Hollywood to Europe for a few years, then came back to die in New York City, at age 58.

But as Leslie Halliwell quotes a Hollywood observer, one Earl Felton: "He was too large for this smelly resort, and the big studios were scared to death of him. A man who was a triple threat kept them awake nights, and I'm certain they were waiting for him to fall on his face so they could pounce and devour this terrible threat to their stingy talents. They pounced and they got him, good. But he knew the great days when his can glowed like a port light from their kissing it."

THE GREAT MCGINTY was the start of those Great Days.





Recommended: Yes