Preston Sturges was a great satirical film maker. My favorite Preston Surges movie was a 1940 B&W classic (“The Great McGinty”) that I saw on TV back in the 1950s. I have never encountered it since then – but I never forgot it.
Until the revelations of organized California Democrat Party voter fraud this week – especially the subsidized homeless and subsidized drug addict recruitment, I had not thought of this hysterically funny satire for a long, long time.
It is a Depression Era setting wherein a destitute Bryan Dunlevy (as Daniel McGinty) comes into town and shows up in a bar looking for a drink. (He always drinks a ‘Boilermaker’ – a shot of whiskey with a beer chaser.) He is wearing an old but serviceable suit – this was long before the modern ‘dress-down’ world of today. (Other than workmen, skilled or otherwise who dressed in workmen’s clothes, every other man wore a suit). In fact, if you ever see a picture of Bobby Thomson’s 1951 playoff homerun (the “shot heard round the world”) landing in the left field Polo Grounds Grandstand, just about all the men were wearing business suits.
He encounters his co-star, Akim Tamiroff (as The Boss), an equally burly character actor from the 1940s era.
It is Election Day. The Boss tells him how to acquire $1. (For $1, you could buy a cup of coffee and a donut and get between 75 and 90 cents change.) The Boss is the senior King-Maker crook who runs the political party that is dominating the state government. He tells McGinty to go to any voting station and simply say to the assembled group of precinct workers: “Hello, Joe!”
The crook called Joe will say: “Hello” and then tell you your voter name. After falsifying a signature as that voter and then entering the 20th Century standard voting booth and voting for the required crooked candidate, the crooked precinct worker will give him a little receipt about the size of an old-fashioned movie theater ticket. McGinty is told that when he brings the ticket back to the bar, he will be given a dollar.
The very next scene has McGinty return to the bar for payment. Only, instead of one ticket, he starts pulling dozens of such tickets out of his several suit pockets.
The two lead characters team up going forward. The Boss remains the King-Maker behind the scenes and, not too long thereafter, McGinty becomes the next elected governor. Selling favors for money is the racket of politics in that era being exposed just as selling favors for money today is continually covered up by the EVIL SCUMBAG PRESS. Today’s Big Government makes the 1940 movie’s politicians look like timid paupers.
The Boss and McGinty are continually fighting with each other and much of the rest of the movie has faded from memory.
It is one of the ten funniest movies that I have ever seen. But the funniest scene that has never left my memory was McGinty pulling dozens of $1-valued ‘coupons’ out of his pockets.
I should thank the California crooked Democrat Party for reminding me of it.
In today’s California, fraudulently printed and filled-out and fraudulently hand-dated illegal post-election day ballots are as good as gold. No one has to enter a voting booth on election day and sign a register to be able to vote today.
