The Great Moment

The Great Moment, as I'm sure you know, is not a typical Preston Sturges movie. It is a historical drama with a few comic moments, all of which are clunky (although a couple of the stranger ones are so bizarre they're entertaining in a way, especially when Morton tries to knock out his dog with ether). The film might actually have been quite great if the comedy were subtracted completely. Yeah, I know, we're talking Sturges here. But Sturges was a great dramatic director, too. See The Great McGinty if you don't believe me - the comedy there is less than in many of his other films, and the drama is more pronounced. Most often, Sturges was a master of mixing both dramatic and comedic moments. All of his films were like that. The Great Moment has an excellent story at its core. A dentist - he was in medical school, but he ran out of money and had to earn his living as a dentist - wants to find a way to knock out his patients before he pulls teeth. He does so with ether. He also has aspirations to introduce the use of ether into the medical profession. These intentions are noble, but his patent hasn't come through and he feels the guilt of every painful operation. You see, the AMA will not allow doctors to use Letheon (his name for it) unless they know exactly what it is. But as soon as he tells, everyone will know, and his discovery will go unrecognized.

The film actually has a very good structure. It begins in medias res, with Morton (Joel McCrea, who is very good in the film) being advised on how to proceed legally to attain a patent. In taking these steps, he ruins his career and reputation. The rest of the film is the buildup to the loss of his secret. The final scene is very powerful. 7/10.

One other small reason you should see this: Franklin Pangborn has the funniest facial hair in this film! Grady Sutton also has a really funny scene.

From The Great McGinty until leaving Paramount at the close of World War II, Preston Sturges created a stream of comedy classics, some of the funniest moments ever put on film. His one failure while he was at Paramount was this film, The Great Moment.

Paramount had Sturges under contract and as such he had to do their bidding and on this occasion the studio required of him to direct this biographical film of the life of William T.G. Morton, the alleged inventor of ether.

From their point of view it was one odd choice to direct a biographical film like The Story of Louis Pasteur or Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. What possessed the studio brains to select Sturges? On the other hand Sturges did have a lot of creative freedom at Paramount so why didn't he just take one for the team and direct a straight forward biography?

He did neither and the film had stalwart Joel McCrea as the dentist who demonstrated the first public use of ether during surgery. Betty Field was his long suffering wife in an earnest, but rather dull biographical study. It's not even that Morton was that noble because there were other claims by people who were working along the same lines as he. It all amounts to a confusing story.

William Demarest was a player beloved of Preston Sturges and he appeared in all of his Paramount films. He does so here as a man who was willing to be experimented on by McCrea. When McCrea gives him a dose of the wrong stuff the results are hilarious, but oh so out of place in this type of film.

For those who love Preston Sturges's comedies as I do, this is one to stay away from.

Decidedly odd, you might think, coming from Preston Sturges but then again, perhaps not as the idiosyncratic Sturges seldom stuck to 'conventional' genre pictures; even his screw-ball comedies were more perverse than what was the norm in Hollywood at the time, so this biopic of the man who discovered anesthesia for use in the dental profession is a far cry from the usual Hollywood biopic, (even the subject is obscure and unlikely). Not, of course, is it necessarily any better for that. It's a slight, disingenuous little picture veering uneasily from drama to comedy without making much of an inroad either way.

Joel McCrea, (blander than usual), is the crusading dentist, (sic), and Betty Field, the wife who eggs him on. Some of the Sturges stock company pop up in sundry supporting parts, (noticeably William Demarest), but none make much of an impression. They, like the film, remain largely inoffensive. Not a failure, precisely, but a blip nevertheless.

I can't add much to wmorrow59's excellent summary. It caught the strengths and weaknesses of this film and provided excellent historical background. Be sure to read it.

This film is only worth watching if you're a Preston Sturges fanatic (like me) and are willing to sit through his one failure as well as his many triumphs. I have a hunch that the studio meddling accounts for much of the trouble -- the movie's pace and structure are erratic at best -- but I also fear that our man Preston may have wandered too far from his natural path as a filmmaker. This is no buried treasure. Sturges's cut may have been an improvement, but I don't see the makings of a good movie here. The dialogue is weird when it isn't plain awful, the protagonist is a pigheaded dimwit, and the moments of slapstick are wildly misplaced.

If you buy Turner's incredible 7-film Sturges box set, do so for the other six titles -- all of them masterpieces.

For those who have enjoyed the brilliant farce comedies made in the early '40s by writer-director Preston Sturges this movie may come as a bewildering disappointment. It's a strangely downbeat biographical film about an obscure Boston dentist, William Morton, who, according to some historians, discovered the anesthetic use of ether for surgery in the mid-nineteenth century. It's said that Morton was falsely accused of plagiarizing his research, ruined his health defending his reputation, and died young, broke and forgotten. Right off the bat you know you're not in traditional Sturges territory.

In the period before this film was made the unexpected popularity of Warner Brothers' biographical dramas such as The Story of Louis Pasteur and Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet inspired the other Hollywood studios to make similar dramas based on the lives of Thomas Edison, Madame Curie, Alexander Graham Bell, etc., but these tales of medical and scientific advance were also upbeat stories of successful and well rewarded endeavor. Sturges, for some reason, was drawn to a story in which the protagonist was wronged and the bad guys won; he also wanted to experiment with chronology and end the film on a high note by circling back in time to Morton's "great moment" of triumph, before his victory slipped away. The director fought pitched battles with his bosses at Paramount to make the film his way, despite the front office's concerns over what wartime audiences preferred to see (not unlike the battle between Orson Welles and RKO over The Magnificent Ambersons, waged at about the same time). Unfortunately, Paramount won. The movie was shelved for two years, and only released in a heavily-altered form after Sturges had quit the studio. The director's cut of the film no longer exists.

So, the movie known as The Great Moment is not the one Sturges made. For starters, he wanted to title his film after the book from which he derived the story, "Triumph Over Pain," and when the studio didn't like that he came up with "Great Without Glory," but eventually they gave it the nondescript title it now bears. Scenes were cut, and the sequence of events was rearranged to fit a more traditional pattern. Those interested in learning what the author actually intended can read his original screenplay in a published collection called Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges, and you'll find a better piece of work than what's left on screen, but although it's an interesting read I have my doubts about whether the project could've ever been a satisfying film. Still, Sturges' version would have at least been the coherent expression of his vision, instead of fragments rearranged by studio functionaries. As it stands, what's left of The Great Moment is odd and erratic. Some of its problems are inherent in the concept while others rest in Sturges' curious casting choices, which were not imposed on him.

Dr. Morton, the protagonist, is never established as a dimensional character, and although Joel McCrea is as likable as ever he seems to be struggling to breathe life into his role. His (and Morton's) likability is put to a severe test in the scene when the doctor comes home tipsy late one night and attempts to experiment on his own dog. On the plus side, there's a sharp performance by character actor Julius Tannen as Morton's former professor, while veteran Harry Carey is memorable as a surgeon who comes to believe in Morton in a moving, climactic scene. But by that point the tone of the story has undergone several strange shifts: in the interest of lightening the mood, I suppose, Sturges inserted comic interludes with his familiar stock characters, notably William Demarest, but these scenes are more jarring than funny. Demarest offers a spirited turn as a patient named Eben Frost whom Morton uses as a human guinea pig, but when Frost repeats the anecdote again and again ("it was the night of September 30. I was in excruciating pain . . .") the running gag grows wearisome. The central concern here, after all, is the intense pain people experienced during surgery before anesthetics were introduced, and, for me anyway, contemplating this reality undercuts the attempts at humor.

It was bold of Sturges to tackle this project instead of playing it safe by making another crowd-pleasing comedy, but the battle with Paramount damaged his career and ultimately drove him from Hollywood entirely. The film available today is not the one he intended us to see, so he shouldn't be judged too harshly for The Great Moment, but one wishes that he'd been more self-protective, even allowing the front office to talk him out of making this film-- or at least postponing it --perhaps sustaining his winning streak as a master of eccentric, sophisticated comedy just a little longer.