The Great McGinty The Great McGinty The Great McGinty is a 1940 political satire comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges, starring Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff and featuring William Demarest and (in her final screen appearance) Muriel Angelus. It was Sturges's first film as a director; he sold the story to Paramount Pictures for just $10 on condition he direct the film. Sturges went on to win the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay. In the U.K. the film was retitled Down Went McGinty. Dan McGinty (Brian Donlevy) is a bartender in a banana republic who recounts his rise and fall
Preston Sturges time. It attracted interest from Hollywood, and Sturges was writing for Paramount by the end of the year. Three other Sturges stage plays were produced from 1930 to 1932, one of them a musical, but none of them were hits. By the end of the year, he was working more in Hollywood as a writer-for-hire, operating on short contracts, for Universal, MGM, and Columbia studios. He also sold his original screenplay for "The Power and the Glory" (1933) to Fox, where it was filmed as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. The film told the story of a self-involved financier via