Preston Sturges' ferociously funny attack on the American political system is a twist on the Abe Lincoln myth: even a bum, backed by the right machine, can become President. The film opens in a Banana Republic bar where the sad stories of two American refugees intersect with classic Sturges irony: one, an ex-bank teller, was an honest man all his life until a fateful moment of temptation led to his demise; the other, the bartender McGinty, laments a life of unadulterated corruption spoiled by one thoughtless, impulsively honest move. “I was governor of a state, baby!” he cries, and tells his story, from humble beginnings in the political system--when he voted 37 times in the same election at two dollars a vote--to his rise, under the patronage of boss Akim Tamiroff, to the governor's chair in what Sturges calls “the mythical city of Chicago in the imaginary state of Illinois.” For his first film as a director, Sturges enlisted members of the growing stock company of character actors for whom he had been creating roles as a scriptwriter: the inimitable William Demarest walks a fine line between unutterable cynicism and utter stupidity as a poker-faced political hack; Tamiroff is hilarious as the immigrant boss (“in the old country I would have been a baron--a robber baron”); and veteran actor Brian Donlevy is a triumph as McGinty, by day a rubber stamp in a plaid suit, by night the reluctant stepfather whose gruff rendition of “Muggily Wump da Tor-toyse” is a memorable moment in American storytelling.