The Great McGinty (1940)
Directed by Preston Sturges
Told in flashback, Depression-era bum Dan McGinty is recruited by the city's political machine to help with vote fraud. His great aptitude for this brings rapid promotion from "the boss," who finally decides he'd be ideal as a new, nominally "reform" mayor; but this candidacy requires marriage. His in-name-only marriage to honest Catherine proves the beginning of the end for dishonest Dan...
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What critics compared The Great McGinty to
To contrast, take Sturges' Oscar-winning screenplay from The Great McGinty, his first film, and William Demarest's line, "If you didn't have graft, you'd have a lower class of people in politics!"
The short-form description of American Hustle is that it's Martin Scorsese, the chronicler of New York sleaze and crime, meeting Preston Sturges, the antic 1940s screwball-comedy king behind The Great McGinty and Sullivan's Travels .
Ernst Lubitsch and his writers made Communism funny in "Ninotchka," and writer-director Preston Sturges took on political corruption in "The Great McGinty" and poverty and incarceration in "Sullivan's Travels."