The Great Mcginty

A hilarious spoof of American politics, this film marked the directorial debut of the mercurial and brilliant Preston Sturges, one of the best writer-directors of the 1940s. While this film never reaches the giddy heights of some of his subsequent films, THE GREAT MCGINTY was a favorable harbinger of the therapeutic madness to come.

The film opens in a smoky banana-republic bar largely patronized, it seems, by Americans on the lam. One such denizen, Thompson (Heydt), is a one-time chief cashier of a major bank turned embezzler. Now dejected from hiding out in this steamy exile, he attempts suicide in the men's room but he's stopped by the bartender, Dan McGinty...