This scene from "The Great McGinty" features the inimitable William Demarest, Brian Donlevy and, one of my favorites, Akim Tamiroff.
Sturges, who directed, was America's top-screenwriters before he persuaded Paramount to let him direct "McGinty." He agreed to charge only $1 for the script if they let him direct. The rest, at least if you're a film historian, is history.
Sturges went on to write and direct some of the great comedies in American film history, including "The Lady Eve," "Sullivan's Travels," and "The Palm Beach Story." All three are on the AFI list of top comedies. He did all this and four or five other flicks in just eight years, before his creative candle flamed out in a blaze of mediocrity in 1948.
"McGinty," by the way, starts with this as its Prologue: "This is the story of two men who met in a banana republic. One of them never did anything dishonest in his life except for one crazy minute. The other never did anything honest in his life except for one crazy minute. They both had to get out of the country."
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