Plot
Dan McGinty (Brian Donlevy) is a bartender in a banana republic who recounts his rise and fall to the bar's dancing girl and an exiled American down on his luck. McGinty's career begins when he was a tramp who, cajoled into voting under a false name in order to get $2, he impresses a local political boss (Akim Tamiroff) by voting thirty-seven times in a rigged mayoral election. McGinty becomes one of the boss's enforcers, then his political protégé, makes a marriage of convenience, wins the mayor's job as a "reform" candidate, then goes on to the governor's mansion before a change of heart compels him to take public service seriously after he and his wife finally fall in love.
His past catches up with him though: he is imprisoned in the next cell to his former mentor. The two men escape and go into exile together, but are still given to violent disagreements.
Read more about this topic: The Great McGinty
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“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
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