PRESTON STURGES’ first biography, “The Great Moment,” is a comically turned life story of the Boston dentist, Dr. William Thomas Green Morton (Joel McCrea performs in this role almost as naturally as the doctor might, perhaps with even less idiosyncrasy), to whom it credits the discovery of anesthesia. It has as much slapstick as most Sturges films but is likably his least vacillating, tricky and cynical one. Sturges probably wanted to make a biographical film that was more down to earth than film memorials usually are, and he succeeded in some ways. Morton, whose impetus for inventing painless dentistry was, the picture says, to stop his patients from leaping about so he could do neater work, spent the last twenty years of his life trying to make the public believe he had discovered etherization, died without a dime, recognition, happiness or peace of mind. Sturges makes him even less glamorous but more natural than Hollywood’s Wilson, Bell, Pasteur, Curie, Edison, Zola, etc., by giving him little humor or obvious wisdom, only an average talent for his work, and a wife (Betty Field) who is on the silly side, ignorant for the most part of what her husband is doing and anxious for him to make more money rather than discoveries. Most of the public, all of his fellow dentists, and the medical profession give him as little help as possible.
This is Sturges’ most humane movie and his least slippery one. There is much less sharp wavering in his estimation of ideas, and little nose-thumbing. He seems glad that his hero is not money-mad, that anesthesia was invented; he is determined in the presentation of the fact that the public is for the most part uncharitable to inventors or inventions; his people aren’t turned so completely and mercilessly into dupes, fools or sadists, but, without oversimplifying them one way or another, he leaves them dominantly mean-minded, silly, avaricious, kindly, snobbish, and he allows them to move, breathe and reason with more personal freedom than his characters have had before.
The story and situations, however, are pretty much traditional Hollywood biography. The film sticks very close to the most successful events of its hero’s life; it is play-like and cardboard-like and somewhat trumped-up. If Sturges wanted determinedly to make a realistic biographical film, he probably was working much more than he usually does against the grain of his studio, which, like all the rest of Hollywood, has firm ideas of what morality and tone should be in such a picture. This may have produced what seems to me a somewhat enervated and tight Sturges movie. But part of the tightness must also have come from Sturges’ own fascination with the problem of success, which he has been gnawing at for some time in his films. Heretofore his answer has been that the greatest success in terms of money and fame can be had by anybody with the aid of luck, trickery or something fortuitous which seldom has much to do with how good or able the person is. In this picture he 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; and though he says this, his picture is designed to spend almost all of its time, in the traditional rosy manner, on the more fortunate moments. His knowledge of and 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. This, which is apparently a conflict in purpose (not to forget the studio), has made the picture less robust and might explain why as much ill fitting slapstick comedy has capped each serious scene.
“The Great Moment” is still very pleasant, on the light side with a few scenes of sharp effect. One is its picture of the epic moment on September 30, 1846, when Morton put his first dental case (William Demarest, still likable but very stereotyped now) under ether after tricking him, in a funny scene, into taking it; following this, much of the suspense, horror and fascination of a mysterious event is projected by the look and walk of his wife as she stares at the operation. Another is the result of some blood-curdling operating-room sounds on the occasion of the first medical surgery under anesthesia. A final one is an aptly dramatic and surprising curtain line. There are also a number of nice perceptions and business, including McCrea’s gesture when he says he likes to do “neat work,” the damning portrait of President Pierce as an idiot, the entrance of four petty minds of the medical profession into an operating room underneath the outstretched, unstinting arm of a huge plaster statue of Hippocrates, and McCrea’s loving attitude toward the decorative quality of a lamp in his dental office. It is not what you would call an important movie, but it is engaging.
November 27, 1944