Reeling Backward: "The Greaty McGinty" (1941)

Circa 1940 Preston Sturges was one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters who really yearned to direct. He was getting paid $2,500 a week -- that's north of $2 million a year in today's dollars -- to churn out screwball comedies and rehashed plots, hating every minute of it. So Sturges sold his script for "The Great McGinty" for $10 on the condition that he be allowed to direct it himself.

(Rather than hiding this fact, Paramount actually promoted it as part of the film's marketing push.)

In the short term Paramount seemed to get the better end of it, as "The Great McGinty" was a decent hint and Sturges won the Academy Award for Original Screenplay -- undoubtedly the lowest-paid Oscar-winning gig ever. But Sturges got what he wanted, a director's seat, and went on to a well-respected, if not particularly lengthy, career behind the camera ("Sullivan's Travels," "Unfaithfully Yours").

"McGinty" is interesting to me for three reasons. It's one of the few leading roles by Brian Donlevy, who usually played supporting parts as crooks and tough guys, most notably as the cruel Sergeant Markoff in "Beau Geste." He had one of those angled faces that, like Martin Landau, seemed almost cartoonishly villainous from a distance, but upon closer inspection was actually breathtakingly beautiful. He's effective and charming here as a lug who makes it big, then loses it all.

Second, the movie uses a storytelling framing device set many years after and thousands of miles away from the central plot, which was a pretty novel premise in 1940. ("Citizen Kane" would go on to employ it soon after.)

But most intriguingly, "McGinty" seems to fly in the face of the Production Code, which more or less mandated that reproachable behavior always be punished in the movies, and acts of goodness are invariably rewarded in the end, even if it takes awhile. ("It's a Wonderful Life" being the classic example.)

Here, the main character is a lout and a thief who becomes a state governor through outright graft and corruption. Happiness and status accrue to him the more rotten he is, including a show marriage that turns into a genuine love affair and close ties with her adopted children. But when he goes straight and attempts to do something honest for the first time ever, his entire life immediately comes crashing down.

McGinty hightails it to a remote country and becomes a bartender at a seedy dive, pouring out cheap booze along with his own story to troubled pilgrims. The wife and kids? Utterly abandoned. If you're expecting a last-minute reunion where the woman walks into his gin joint to reassure the audience everything turned out OK in the end, you'll be waiting a long time.

What's the takeaway here? It's better to be honest, but if you're a crook you'd best stay a crook?

At a spare 81 minutes, "The Great McGinty" flies by at a breakneck pace. It almost seems like one minute Dan McGinty (Donlevy) is a street bum who earns a wad of cash by going from precinct to precinct to vote for the mayor dozens of times, to becoming the mayor himself and then the governor.

The best and funniest part is the second act as McGinty becomes the collections enforcer for the local mob boss (Akim Tamiroff) -- credited, simply, as "The Boss" -- who keeps the politicians in his pocket. The Boss is bemused by the pug-nosed nobody who dares to punch him back when punched. The two form an odd brotherly relationship, exchanging brash displays of masculinity and always ready to throw down in fisticuffs at any disagreement.

McGinty buys himself an outlandish striped suit and sets out to collect outstanding debts for The Boss. He uses his fists when provoked, but shows a gift of gab, talking an elderly female psychic out of $200 by pointing out the risks to her own future. This leads to a stint as city alderman, handing out contracts for bribes.

When the longtime Mayor (Arthur Hoyt) becomes outdated for the reform-minded times, McGinty is picked as the golden boy. Since women have recently gotten the vote -- an indication the main story is set in the 1920s -- McGinty needs to be a family man. His secretary, Catherine (Muriel Angelus), volunteers for the duty, pointing out it will mutually benefit each of them -- though she fails to mention her two urchins until after the wedding vows are sealed.

Of course, once McGinty feels he is "free" of The Boss' influence, he starts listening to Catherine's urging to shut down the tenements and pass new child labor laws. The Boss doesn't take kindly to the insurrection, leading to a throwdown right in the new governor's office.

I quite enjoyed "The Greaty McGinty," though it's obviously a minor work in the oeuvre of Preston Sturges. It's the rare movie that would have been better if it were longer and slower. Still, it got him through the studio's door, gave Donlevy one of his most memorable roles and delivered a subtle middle finger to the rigid filmmaking mores of the day.

Reeling Backward: "Island in the Sky" (1953)

"Island in the Sky" is something of a progenitor of the modern disaster flick. It's more limited in scope, with just five men trapped in the Canadian tundra when their plane is blown off course and runs out of fuel. But it has all the hallmarks of the disaster genre -- an existential threat, mounting tension leading to antagonism amongst the survivors, a brief early hope for rescue that is soon dashed, and eventual salvation for most, due largely to their own ingenuity and grit.

Director William A. Wellman was a World War I pilot and aviation nut who often returned to aerial spectacles whenever he could. The footage of mid-century transport planes cruising around frozen mountaintops and forests is indeed breathtaking, though it gets a bit old after a while.

Written by Ernest K. Gaan, "Island" was based on Gann's own novel, a fictionalized version of a real-life rescue in which he took part as a search pilot in 1943. I found the entire film rather flat and emotionless, filled with a bunch of stock characters -- with one or two notable exceptions.

The movie is best at depicting the quiet camaraderie of the civilian airline pilots recruited at the start of World War II, who as the narration (provided by Wellman himself) describes, are "of the Army but not in the Army." They fly long, grueling supply runs in dangerous weather and even uncharted territories, but are afforded a great deal of autonomy from the military command.

The title refers to the psychological sense of calm that pilots construct for themselves. They endeavor in a dangerous vocation that could lead to the death of their entire crew based on a single mistake. So they compensate by projecting a demeanor of unflappability that can be soothing to those around them, but takes a toll on their own psyche.

John Wayne plays Dooley, the steely captain who manages to land his plane in an ice storm, and then becomes the father/protector for his young charges. He must carefully ration the food, try to contact help using the plane's failing batteries to power the transmitter, and keep his men from losing their heads.

One of them does lose his head, co-pilot Frank Lovatt (Sean McClory), who wanders off into a storm and becomes snow blind. In perhaps the film's only moment of true power, Wellman pulls back the camera on Lovatt's body being quickly covered with falling snow to reveal that the man is actually only a few feet from the tail section of his plane.

Wayne was much praised for his performance, since he largely abandons the familiar cocky persona and embodies the role of a man up to his neck in panicky fear, laboring hard not to show it.

The other three crew members are pretty standard archetypes -- a no-nonsense galoot, a hyperactive radioman and a fresh-faced kid with a new baby at home. They never make any sort of real impact as distinctive characters.

Similarly, the fellow pilots who take up the search for Dooley and his crew are standard issue, and include James Arness as a big bruiser.

The one actor I couldn't keep my eyes off of is Andy Devine as Willie Moon, the unofficial leader of the search effort. The size of a buffalo and as cool as a cat, Moon likes to seem unperturbed by everything. At one point his crewman accuses him of appearing to actually care about something, and Willie furiously denies it.

Devine gives him all sorts of little signatory tics, like using a clothespin in the cockpit to hold his cigarette, or using a little grabber tool to work the comm switches rather than trying to shift his tremendous bulk.

As was frequent with Wellman's films, women are shunted to a far back burner. We only glimpse two or three female characters in flashback or telephone cutaway scenes. I get the sense Wellman included even those only begrudgingly.

A couple of nits I'd like to pick: when the other planes are searching for the lost crew, they fly in a close formation together rather than spreading out -- not a very effective way to cover lots of ground. Also, despite the frigid temperature of minus-70 degrees being repeated ad nauseum to pump up audience's sense of peril, none of the actors' breath is ever visible.

For a flick based on a true story, "Island in the Sky" feels like bunch of studio hooey.