After producing, writing and directing one hit film after another, Preston Sturges finally misfired with the biopic The Great Moment. Sturges was always fascinated with the saga of W.T.G. Morton, the 19th century Boston dentist who, after inventing the first truly effective anesthesia, was forced to give up his proprietary interest in the invention and ended up dying in poverty and obscurity. Joel McCrea stars as Morton, a young oral surgeon determined to find a painless method for exracting teeth-which he does, virtually by accident. Betty Field costars as Morton's faithful spouse Elizabeth, while Sturges regular William Demarest offers a gem of a performance as Morton's best friend-guinea pig Eben Frost (his persistence upon recalling his first meeting with Morton -- "I was in excru-ci-ating pain"-is one of the film's highlights). Completed in 1942, The Great Moment was taken out of Sturges' hands and heavily re-edited and re-arranged by the Paramount executives: as a result, the story is confusing and downright incomprehensible at times (the film's present ending, for example, originally occured in the middle of the film). The result was varying runtimes for the film of 80, 83, 87, and 90 minutes. An enormous box-office flop in 1944, the film proved to be the beginning of the end for Sturges, who was never able to completely recover from its failure.

General Complete name : The Great Moment.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave File size : 1.09 GiB Duration : 1h 21mn Overall bit rate : 1 930 Kbps Writing application : FairUse Wizard - http://fairusewizard.com Writing library : The best and REALLY easy backup tool Video #0 ID : 0 Format : MPEG-4 Visual Format profile : [email protected] Format settings, BVOP : Yes Format settings, QPel : No Format settings, GMC : No warppoints Format settings, Matrix : Default (MPEG) Muxing mode : Packed bitstream Codec ID : XVID Codec ID/Hint : XviD Duration : 1h 21mn Bit rate : 1 728 Kbps Width : 640 pixels Height : 464 pixels Display aspect ratio : 1.379 Frame rate : 23.976 fps Resolution : 24 bits Colorimetry : 4:2:0 Scan type : Progressive Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.243 Stream size : 1 001 MiB (90%) Writing library : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04) Audio #1 ID : 1 Format : AC-3 Format/Info : Audio Coding 3 Codec ID : 2000 Duration : 1h 21mn Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 192 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Channel positions : L R Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Stream size : 111 MiB (10%) Alignment : Split accross interleaves Interleave, duration : 42 ms (1.00 video frame) Interleave, preload duration : 500 ms

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036880/

English audio; Multilanguage subpack (English, French and Spanish)

Preston Sturges - The Great Moment (1944)