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
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)