The Great Moment (1944)

Writer/director Preston Sturges had the odd idea to make a bio-pic about Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, the 19th Century American dentist who pioneered the use of ether based anesthetic as a pain killer during surgery. This odd idea resulted in an odd movie, a bio-pic that's part comedy, and part earnest championing of a man who Sturges felt got a raw deal from history. Joel McCrea plays Dr. Morton, he's not a great actor but he was a favorite of Sturges and gets down the earnestness combined with indignation of his part satisfactorily. The story its self is intriguing, though not one that particularly lends its self to a film treatment, Sturges even goes so far as to put selections from books that Morton is reading up on the screen, a fairly clever way of communicating kind of dry information to the audience. Mediocre as a bio-pic, and for the most part lame as comedy, with the great William Demarest (another Sturges favorite) providing most of the laughs, "It was the night of September 30th, and I was in excruciating pain..." The final film was evidently edited by the studio in a manner not keeping wit  Sturgeses intent, so maybe a directors cut of the film would have been better, though sometimes Sturges was his own worst enemy when it came to overloading his films. In the end The Great Moment is an odd curio, which has a couple of good moments, but on the whole never came together for me. **