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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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“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)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)