THE GREAT MOMENT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 312, 15 June 1945, Page 19

THE GREAT MOMENT

(Paramount)

"()F all things in Nature, gfeat men alone reverse the law of perspective by growing smaller the closer one approaches

to look at them. Ihat quotation, which I hope I took down correctly in the dark, comes in the foreword to Preston Sturges’ cine-biography of Dr, W. G. T. Morton, the Boston dentist who discovered the use of sulphuric ether as an anaesthetic in 1846, I don’t know wether Preston Sturges said it first, but it seems to me worth saying, and it makes a promising opening to a promising subject, Unfortunately the promise is not quite kept. As Sturges takes us closer to Morton he not only becomes smaller: he also becomes ridiculous and unlifelike. I believe the trouble here is fundamentally the same as in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek: Sturges has too much head and not enough heart for what is, strictly speaking, a poignant subject. Here he gives us a grim enough impression of the tortures endured by humanity on the operating table and in the dentist’s chair before the discovery of anaesthesia, but he does not really convey much pity for those unfortunates. He cannot resist the temptation to play the fool. Light relief is certainly called for with such a theme, and legitimate opportunities for it are there, but some of the slapstick antics in The Great Moment are more suited to a Marx Brothers film than this. Still the general method of treatingthe story is interesting and effective. In the first ten minutes Sturges disposes of all the bitterness and frustration which Dr. Morton (Joel McCrea) suffered following his discovery-he could not

secure a patent, was denounced as a plagiarist by other scientists, and died in poverty, but with humanity very heavily in his debt. This approach leaves the director free to concentrate on Morton’s struggles as a student, his marriage, his experiments (often on himself), and his short-lived syccess. And Sturges does partly atone for his callousness by putting some real feeling into the finalethe "great moment" when Morton throws away the chances of a fortune by revealing the secret of his discovery so that the medical profession everywhere mav freely use it,