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reverse American success story where triumph and innovation are followed by rejection, poverty, despair, and anonymity.
    In case the darkness and futility of the subject’s story aren’t evident enough, Sturges planned to have the written prologue appear in front of its protagonist’s long-forgotten gravestone. Instead,
Moment
opens with William being fêted by adoring onlookers as he presides over a parade in his honor. Sturges’ jaundiced take on the fate of great men makes it on-screen in a less incendiary form via a prologue, arguing, “Of all things in nature, great men alone reverse the laws of perspective and grow smaller as one approaches them. Dwarfed by the magnitude of this revelation, reviled, hated by his fellow men, forgotten before he was remembered, Morton seems very small indeed, until the incandescent moment he ruined himself for a servant girl and gained immortality.”
    This bracing cold shower of a prologue is followed by an even more despairing sequence where Eben purchases one of his boss’ medals from a pawnshop. It’s dedicated “To The Benefactor Of MankindWith The Gratitude Of Humanity.” Eben brings the medal to Elizabeth, who recounts how no one showed up at William’s funeral except herself and his children. The fight is lost before it’s even begun. We’ve buried a sad, broken, defeated man before we’ve had a chance to get to know him.
    The film then flashes back to William receiving news that Congress is considering a bill to award him $100,000 as a tardy reward for his service to humanity. For reasons too convoluted and complicated to go into, our hero never receives the money and is pilloried by the media as a scheming opportunist. Poverty, disgrace, and death await.
    The film’s first 10 minutes contain death, a lonely funeral, crucifixion by the press, a fortune that morphs into public humiliation, a great man’s spirit being broken, and complicated legal and legislative wrangling. It’s tragedy before triumph, the funeral before the birth of a great idea. Banking cynically on the popularity of Sturges’ previous films, Paramount tried to sell
Moment
as “hilarious as a whiff of laughing gas.” One can only imagine how audiences expecting another wacky Preston Sturges romp must have responded to this opening gauntlet of hopelessness and despair.
    Before ether, William’s interactions with customers resemble a Mexican wrestling match more than a medical procedure. It’s all screaming and scary-looking torture devices and patients slinking away from the waiting room in abject terror. The bloodcurdling screams of patients haunt William’s nightmares and jangle his nerves. There has to be a better way.
    Our hero begins to stumble toward a panacea for pain when he accosts an angry and inebriated Dr. Jackson at a bar. Jackson flaunts his contempt for what he remembers as a “rather dull student” and says, “One of the cankers of our profession is the number of youths without funds or proper background who try to worm their way into it for the rich rewards they imagine it holds.” Yet it’s Jackson who accidentally gives William the idea that will make his career when he discusses the pain-deadening qualities of sulfuric ether.
    In a genre rife with hagiographies, Sturges’ biopic impishly begins its hero’s journey to greatness with him badgering a misanthropic former teacher until that teacher is willing to do anything to end their unstructured conversation, even if it means giving a lowly dentist invaluable professional advice.
    The world’s first and only dental-ether tragicomedy,
The Great Moment
gets endless comic mileage out of ether and nitrous oxide’s mind-warping effects on patients. Demarest, a longtime fixture of Sturges’ repertory company, is a hoot as William’s first and most enthusiastic patient, a professional human guinea pig who submits to