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The evolution is from hoodlum to governor, "you gotta crawl before you can creep, right?" Mark Twain's "new political gospel" is the basis, envisioned by Preston Sturges as a saloon-counter fable—the bartender (Brian Donlevy) was once the Great McGinty, he tells his tale to pacify a suicidal barfly. The first lesson is that chicanery beats a soup line on a cold election night, the hobo votes 37 times and falls in with The Boss (Akim Tamiroff), who values an able chiseler. The tour of power structures involves shaking down fortune tellers and bail bondsmen until "a typical American" is needed to run for office. "What you rob you spend, and what you spend goes back to the people, so where's the robbery?" The circularity of the graft racket is voiced by the secretary (Muriel Angelus), who provides the protagonist with a ready-made family and then stirs his conscience. The patsy's newfound reformist zeal stupefies The Boss: "The 'people'? Are you sick or something?" Capra's world of brassy campaigns and stump speeches minus Capra's Pietàs, the hero scowls at the church across his home and deems child labor inhuman except in taffy factories. In this caustic view, the "land of great opportunity" is best appreciated in the rear-view mirror by shady exiles in a "banana republic" cantina. Can the system be challenged, or just left behind? Sturges gives the material a stormy reading, already with room for centrifugal marvels like William Demarest and Jimmy Conlin and analytical gags like the soundproof limousine. (Oblivious to the scuffle in the backseat, the chauffeur is locked in his private slangy whirl: "You said it!... That goes double for me!... You're telling me!") Consequences are at once felt in Citizen Kane, and down the road in Ritchie's The Candidate. With Allyn Joslyn, Louis Jean Heydt, Harry Rosenthal, Arthur Hoyt, Thurston Hall, Libby Taylor, and Steffi Duna. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |