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.

Everybody else seems to think there's a lot wrong with this film, but I rather liked it. THE GREAT MOMENT (1944) sees Preston Sturges doing something a little different from the screwy comedies that he's known for. The movie is not a comedy, first of all. It's a more serious Sturges film about a real historical figure. It's the story of the discovery of anesthesia, which would revolutionize medical practice by allowing for painless surgeries. I thought it was very interesting.

Joel McCrea plays W.T.G. Morton, the dentist and amateur scientist who experiments with the use of ether vapor to dull the senses. Ultimately he must share his discovery with the world for the benefit of all mankind, rather than exploit his secret for profit.

The flick breezes by at 81 minutes, so it doesn't delve into the protagonist's personal life as much as other biopics. Sturges puts his own spin on the Hollywood biopic with his flair for comedy still shining through, particularly in William Demarest's scenes. Under Sturges's direction, even the scenes of Morton reading a reference book manage to capture the thrill of scientific discovery and there's some interesting non-linear storytelling early on.

THE GREAT MOMENT may not be a signature Preston Sturges comedy, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it.

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.

Now this...This is a weird film. Preston Sturges, known very well and paid very well for his ability to write and direct comedies, takes on a biopic of Dr. W. T. Morton, the dentist who reportedly was the first to use ether as an anesthetic. Morton seems like a curious case study because of the rancor around whether he, Dr. Charles Jackson, or Dr. Horace Wells came up with it first combined with the fact that he didn't actually invent anything while also including all of the contradictory ideas about him protecting his practice banging up against his desire to be a humanitarian. It's a mix that could be a complex portrait of a man, the invention of a new application of an existing compound, and the historical period, but Sturges doesn't go for complex. He goes for hagiography, and it's just...weird.

The first thing that's off about this film is the structure. One common positive attribute of every film Sturges had made up to this point what his extreme command of structure. Three acts, each taking up almost exactly a third of the film, filled with character and action, feeding from one to the next towards a conclusion. The opening here, though, is a whiplash back and forth in time as the credits show Morton (Joel McCrea) at the height of his fame followed by scenes of Eben Frost (William Demarest) visiting the widowed Mrs. Morton (Betty Field) after Dr. Morton's death which leads to Mrs. Morton reminiscing about when she and Dr. Morton first met when he was a boarder at her mother's boarding house. It also jumps forward to after Morton's victory when he visits President Franklin Pierce Porter Hall) to ask him to sign a bill that would award him $100,000 for his contribution to medicine. It's honestly a weird way to start things, and it's so completely out of character for how Sturges wrote movies that I have to wonder what drove him to make it like this.

Anyway, the main thrust of the film is Dr. Morton dropping out of medical school because he doesn't have the funds and becoming a dentist. The historical side of things that I probably find most interesting (besides a dramatic appearance of President Pierce who...this has got to be pretty unique, huh?) is the view of dentists as almost the scum of the medical word in the early half of the 19th century. It doesn't get the most focus, but it's interesting nonetheless, just popping up from time to time as reason to dismiss Morton from more respected medical professionals.

That being said, Morton has the same problem as every other dentist: dental work is painful and there's no good way to prevent the pain. A fellow dental student, Dr. Wells (Louis Jean Heydt) tries to use nitrous oxide, much to the objection of Morton's old medical school teacher Dr. Jackson (Julius Tannen) because it will just suffocate the patient to knock them out. It's through Jackson's meandering thoughts about the use and properties of ether that Morton accidentally comes up with using sulfuric ether inhalations to knock people out safely.

Now, this isn't a straight drama from Sturges. He obviously can't ignore the impulse to deliver comedy where he can, and while it does provide some of the weird tonal imbalances in the film, these moments are probably the heights of the film. The biggest moment is Morton trying out the compound for the first time on Frost, having gotten an impure mixture from the chemist that caused a drunken and violent effect on his patient rather than a sleeping effect. It's a showcase for Demarest to just go nuts, and it's an entertaining little sequence.

The central conflict within Morton that the movie never really addresses is the idea that he's keeping the use of ether a secret (calling it letheon) in order to protect his business but he wants to give it to hospitals for free for the betterment of humanity. If he ends up giving away industrial sized amounts of letheon to hospitals across the world...will he be able to pay for that? And it's there because Sturges, adapting a book by René Fülöp-Miller, never even comes close to the idea that maybe Morton was less responsible for the use of ether than he ever said. This is where a more-serious minded approach to the material might have worked, using a critical eye to look at the amorphous nexus of invention around an existing compound and properties already described in medical textbooks. Instead, Sturges leans heavily into the idea of Morton being a secular saint free of critique other than he loved too much.

The ending is really weird, too. I mean, not just from the image which is all proto-religious of Morton essentially being a gift from God to help a girl about to go under the knife despite the medical community's rightful resistance to using an unknown compound during procedures, but also in terms of the actual movement of plotting. We don't get a whole lot of time with it, the film cutting to credits right as a door opens and Morton gets welcomed with open arms, but it doesn't make sense. He's been sent away because they won't use his compound, and he just shows up and they welcome him openly? It honestly just doesn't make sense.

So, this is the first real stumble of Sturges' directing career. It's a weird mix of heavy drama, biopic, hagiography, and comedy that never comes together. It works best in the comedic space, but that never holds for more than a few minutes at a time, forgotten for much longer in between moments. The historical angle is interesting, but far from the focus. The hagiography is a mess and is the focus, and it doesn't work.

I mean, it's helped by the fact that it's a grant 81 minutes long and has some chuckles along the way, but this is really just...weird.

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.