The Great Moment
Preston Sturges (1944)
The Great Moment marked the end of Preston Sturges’s relationship with Paramount. The producer Buddy DeSylva wasn’t happy with the film; nor was Sturges with how DeSylva and the studio cut the picture before it was released, more than two years after being shot, in the late summer of 1944. A commercial and critical failure at the time, this proved an unfortunately pivotal movie for Sturges: it was the eighth feature he’d directed in the space of five years but he subsequently made only four more films before his death in 1959. The odd narrative structure of The Great Moment reflects the director’s intentions as much as Paramount butchery; a good part of the piece’s interest derives from a tension between the conventions of contemporary Hollywood biographies of medical pioneers, and Sturges’s sensibility and style; and this puzzling, disjointed movie lacks the energy of all the other films of his that I’ve seen. Yet I liked it a lot.
William Thomas Green Morton (1819-68), a Boston dentist, was the first person publicly to demonstrate, in 1846, the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anaesthetic. Whether he was also the scientific discoverer of ether’s properties as an anaesthetic is a more disputed claim – but one that Morton remained intent on proving for the rest of his short life. The matter was still controversial in 1940, when the cultural historian and writer René Fülöp-Miller published a book called Triumph over Pain. Fülöp-Miller contended that Morton was indeed the sole discoverer of ether as an anaesthetic but that he was vilified by the medical profession – not least because he was a dentist, not a doctor. What isn’t in dispute is that Morton failed to profit financially from his work with ether, or ‘Letheon’ as he called it. His patents were disallowed. His repeated applications to Congress for ‘national recompense’ failed.
Paramount purchased the screen rights to Fülöp-Miller’s book with a view to Henry Hathaway directing the film and Gary Cooper playing Morton. Both men then left Paramount. According to Sturges’s biographer, James Curtis:
‘… Preston Sturges picked up on the story, dismissing its alleged inaccuracies, embracing instead its marvellous lesson of ingratitude and despair. It was the same kind of dark, everything-right-gone-all-wrong story that Sturges had concocted with The Power and the Glory [which Sturges wrote but didn’t direct]; the success and achievement scenario followed by trial and without a happy ending. It offered something decidedly different in the genre of biography and, in 1942, a chance to direct a film with a theme and structure similar to his most prestigious film of the 1930s.’
The opening credits for The Great Moment appear against scenes of a public procession celebrating what Morton (Joel McCrea) has done. The cheering crowd display placards proclaiming ‘Pain is no more’, and so on. (It’s tempting to see this as an echo of Hail the Conquering Hero; strictly speaking, it’s an anticipation of that film, which went into production a year later, although it was released before, The Great Moment.) After a written prologue – which stresses, as well as the agony of medical surgery in the pre-ether age, human beings’ propensity to treat their saviours badly – Sturges cuts to a street in winter. An elderly man (William Demarest) goes into a pawn shop and redeems an item, a medal inscribed ‘To the Benefactor of Mankind – With the Gratitude of Humanity’. It was once awarded to Morton; its owner was forced eventually to hock the medal. The man who has redeemed it – his name is Eben Frost – visits Morton’s widow, Lizzie (Betty Field), and gives the medal to her. In conversation with Frost, Lizzie describes her husband’s last days. Everything that follows in The Great Moment is thus shadowed by the knowledge of what eventually became of this particular conquering hero. Sturges confounds storytelling expectations by next describing how Morton’s hopes were raised then dashed in his final petition to the government. The melancholy mood of the story is firmly set by the time the narrative moves into a chronologically earlier flashback, which covers the early years of the Mortons’ marriage and of his dental practice, and the events leading up to his use of ether as an anaesthetic. This flashback comprises the rest of the film.
I don’t mean to imply that The Great Moment isn’t often funny. It is – as social comedy and in mining the comedy of enduring fears of the dentist’s chair. There are lovely, witty details, such as a sequence in which Morton hunts down information in a medical dictionary and Sturges puts the text of dictionary entries on screen (including ‘see page 341’ etc, to move Morton on to the next stage of his search). The fair amount of robust physical comedy in the film functions almost as an expression of the conflict between Sturges’s movie-making temperament and the genre in which he’s working. There’s an absorbing impasse too between his scorn for the human behaviour that ruined Morton and a desire to convey the substance of the protagonist’s achievements. Manny Farber’s review of the film (27 November 1944) notes that Sturges:
‘… is definitely interested in the great trouble a man had in achieving success, and in the fact that what success the man had was followed by twenty years of miserable failure … [Sturges’s] knowledge of an interest in the non-American-dream quality of Morton’s career seems to have been suffocated by his interest in whatever there was in the career that looked good.’
Joel McCrea’s quality of likeable, foolish determination, although sometimes amusing, has a tragic aspect here – the impact is stronger because this effect is so different from that achieved by McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story. His straightforwardness and lack of pretension as an actor also increase this tragic impact – the same attributes that increased the comic impact of his characters in those two earlier films. (I don’t get either Manny Farber’s nostalgia for the ‘maleness’ of Hollywood actors in pre-war Westerns and other action films or his dislike of later movie acting styles but I think I do see in Joel McCrea’s expressive naturalness, in his work for Sturges, something of what Farber preferred and increasingly missed.) McCrea is well partnered in The Great Moment by Betty Field, whose Lizzie is a convincing character – socially conscious and pretentious, more concerned that her husband improves their bank balance than that he alleviates human suffering, repeatedly scolding but evidently loving him too. As Eben Frost, the patient on whom Morton first uses anaesthetic and who becomes his doughty, clueless, repetitious sidekick, William Demarest blends broad-comedy brio with a surging loyalty that makes you laugh and is touching too. The two men who claim that Morton has pinched their ideas, his former professor and former colleague, are played by Julius Tannen and Louis Jean Heydt respectively. Harry Carey is excellent as the fair-minded surgeon John Collins Warren.
Does Sturges’s title refer to Morton’s first successful use of ether on a patient or to the final event of the film, when he walks into an operating theatre to sacrifice his commercial advantage, revealing to Professor Warren – and the world – the chemical composition of Letheon? Probably both. It’s an unfortunate fact of Hollywood history that a movie with this name proved the turning point for Preston Sturges’s career. You can only feel grateful that he’d already done so much good stuff – it’s been great watching it at BFI these last few weeks. (An entirely coincidental but undeniable pleasure for this viewer and racing fan was in seeing a film called The Great Moment a couple of hours after one occurred at the Cheltenham NH Festival, when Sprinter Sacre won his second two-mile Champion Chase.)
16 March 2016