Dan McGinty, Brian Donlevy, a bartender stranded in a banana republic, tells a sprawling tale of ascent, power, and a fall that hinges on a single, defining moment. He recounts his relationship to the bar’s dancing girl, Steffi Duna, and to a suicidal American customer named Tommy, a once-trusted bank employee who can no longer return to the United States or his family after a fateful act of temptation and theft. McGinty’s fate mirrors his companion’s in that it stems not from one grand fraud but from “one crazy minute” of honesty that proves as consequential as any deceit, a truth he unfolds through a long flashback.
His rise begins when a tramp accepts $2 to vote under a false name in a rigged mayoral election, a gambit he plays out at thirty-seven precincts, a feat that catches the eye of the local political boss, Akim Tamiroff. From that moment, McGinty becomes both enforcer and protege, drawn deeper into a machine where loyalty is transactional and power is currency. During a public push for reform, the boss pushes a audacious plan: McGinty should be elected mayor as a reform candidate. To seal the role, the boss declares that a credible reformer must be married, and his secretary arranges a marriage of convenience which McGinty accepts, ushering him into office as the city’s mayor, Arthur Hoyt presiding in the background in the role the film casts as the political theater of the time.
Once in office, McGinty continues the corruption he once helped enable, arguing that public works and real improvements still bless the people even if the path to them is paved with bribes. Yet as he lives inside this paradox, he and his wife grow closer, and he begins to take her ideals on public service seriously. He falls in love with the very principles she embodies, even as he insists he is not powerful enough to act against the boss who pulled his strings. Five years pass, and the boss elevates McGinty to the governorship, forging a new sense of inevitability about their shared fate. On inauguration day, McGinty tells the boss that their partnership is over; the boss responds with rage, drawing a gun and forcing McGinty into a crisis that ends with his arrest, a brutal reminder of the costs of their tangled bargain.
The story then shifts to their uneasy companionship in adjacent jail cells, where the boss engineers an escape for them both. As McGinty maintains his connection to his wife and the money he has hidden, the flashback resolves with the stark realization that the boss—the very man who helped him rise—still governs his life. The clear through-line remains: reform was a sham, ambition was weaponized, and the old guard persists, shaping McGinty’s fate even in the wake of supposed change. The film closes on the uneasy, enduring frictions between man and mentor, power and conscience, and the shape of a life built on transactions rather than trust.
