My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  It was the beginning of the end for one of our greatest writer-directors. After The Great Moment spelled the death of his formerly fruitful relationship with Paramount, Sturges endured a disastrous stint co-running a nonstarting film studio with Howard Hughes. He suffered from mounting debt and projects that never got off the ground. Between the release of The Great McGinty and The Great Moment, Preston Sturges went from being seen as the miracle man with the magic touch to a difficult filmmaker whose best days were behind him.

  Sturges’ lively exploration of the birth of painless dentistry was fucked in myriad ways, most of them related to timing. The studio flinched at releasing a film called Triumph Over Pain during World War II. Pain was everywhere. Audiences went to movies to escape pain, not to be reminded of it. To audiences smarting from the recent Depression and a bloody world war, the pain aspect of the film’s original title negated the triumph part.

  As documented in James Curtis’ Between Flops: A Biography Of Preston Sturges, the filmmaker originally began the film with a prologue that begins, “One of the most charming characteristics of Homo sapiens, the wise guy on your right, is the consistency with which he has stoned, crucified, burned at the stake, and otherwise rid himself of those who consecrated their lives to his further comfort and well-being so that all his strength and cunning might be preserved for the erection of ever larger monuments, memorial shafts, triumphal arches, pyramids, and obelisks to the eternal glory of generals on horseback, tyrants, usurpers, dictators, politicians, and other heroes who led him, usually from the rear, to dismemberment and death.”

  There you have it, folks: Strap yourself in tight, eat some popcorn, put your arm around your best gal, and enjoy a film about a great man who finds himself “ridiculed, burned in effigy, ruined, and eventually driven to despair and death by the beneficiaries of his revelation.” Decades later, the original prologue still feels bracingly dark, with its bleak vision of a world where fools who send men to horrible deaths are sanctified, while people who ease pain are crucified. At the beginning of World War II, it must have seemed borderline treasonous, especially its reference to “generals on horseback” leading from the rear. It’s no surprise that the prologue was amputated from the final film.

  Yet World War II was also, strangely, the perfect time to release a film about the development of anesthesia. Sturges posits that William Thomas Green Morton’s refinement of sulfuric ether as an anesthetic marked the birth of modern medicine, the moment when pain stopped being a necessary evil and became controllable. Sturges gives us a secret history of Western medicine as a half-blind grasping toward progress from a motley assortment of semi-disreputable figures. Wouldn’t Americans, especially GIs, want to learn more about the man who made it possible for them to doze dreamily during operations, oblivious to the pain of surgery? In this instance, the answer was definitely no. Ignorance was bliss.

  The Great Moment deviates dramatically from the Great Man model of history by presenting its hero (Joel McCrea, also the star of Sullivan’s Travels) not as a solitary genius but as a hardworking, ambitious, but not terribly bright failed medical student who revolutionizes anesthesia by building upon the work of colleague Dr. Horace Wells (Louis Jean Heydt), who popularized nitrous oxide as a painkiller, and pompous college professor Dr. Charles Jackson (Julius Tannen).

  For the film’s structure, Sturges returned to the achronological template of his screenplay for 1933’s The Power And The Glory, a critically acclaimed drama about the rise and fall of an industrialist (Spencer Tracy); it was a key influence on Citizen Kane. In Sturges’ original script, William’s story is told in flashback by his wife, Elizabeth (Betty Field), and his assistant, Eben Frost (William Demarest). They trace a 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 Mankind With 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 ingesting ether out of a desire to clean up on William’s double-your-money-back guarantee but continues taking it because he really, really likes getting high. The film balances physical comedy and wrenching drama in the terrifying/amusing moment when a horrified Elizabeth stumbles upon her husband, who has gotten high on his own ether supply. He’s lying at his desk with a look of narcotized contentment, marveling approvingly at the metal rod he’s jammed into his hand. If Road House has taught us anything, it’s that pain doesn’t hurt, especially when accompanied by William’s magic elixir.

  William’s creation proves successful in a medical trial, but the Hippocratic Oath forbids doctors from using patent medicines with unknown i
ngredients, so William must decide between martyring himself for humanity’s sake and revealing his secrets, or holding on to his patents and his shot at unimaginable riches.

  By beginning at the story’s tragic conclusion and working diligently toward the middle, The Great Moment ends with William’s defining moment, his decision to sacrifice his own success so that others might be spared pain. Moment opens on a sustained note of funereal gloom but rouses itself to become a funny, vibrant, deeply sad look at the way the system fails dreamers and idealists. Paramount took the film away from Sturges, but his playful spirit pervades the production.

  Paramount sat on The Great Moment for two years before dumping it into theaters with a trailer breathlessly promising a far-fetched yet improbably true yarn from “Hollywood’s madcap Preston Sturges, who created that laugh riot Miracle At Morgan’s Creek.”

  With its emphasis on raucous slapstick and overheated prose, the trailer is designed to mislead, yet it accidentally tells the truth. The only drama Hollywood’s madcap Preston Sturges directed doubles as a pretty terrific, surprisingly moving Preston Sturges comedy.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Secret Success

  Testifying Book-Exclusive Case File: Gospel Road: A Story Of Jesus

  There once lived an icon notorious for the violent nature of his art. He was a dark, troubled soul plagued by rapacious personal demons, a man whose battles with substance abuse were legendary. Yet this tortured soul clung to faith as a life preserver in a sea of darkness. A man of fierce contradictions and even fiercer convictions, this shadowy figure used the power, money, and clout he made peddling bloody entertainment to spread the Gospel.

  Ignoring the most sacrosanct commandment in all of entertainment—Thou shalt not invest thine own money—he sank much of his personal fortune into a supremely risky venture. Ignoring conventional wisdom, he traveled abroad to co-write, produce, and finance a movie about Jesus. Jesus had saved this tormented soul from himself and his compulsions; now he wanted to share that redemption with the secular world.

  We all know how this story ends, don’t we? With the mystery man in question triumphing over the skeptics and doubters en route to delivering one of the most commercially successful independent films of all time. Then he was undone by the Jew-run law-enforcement establishment and a sugar-titted lady cop one drunken night. Ah, but this isn’t a book about winners. It’s a tribute to the losers. So the man in question isn’t Mel Gibson, and the film isn’t The Passion Of The Christ. No, I’m talking about Johnny Cash’s half-forgotten 1973 religious drama Gospel Road: A Story Of Jesus.

  In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Cash was, in the hackneyed parlance of Behind The Music, riding high. Live At Folsom Prison (1968) resurrected his flagging career and rebranded him as a proud champion of the underdog. A year later, At San Quentin did even better, thanks to a bleakly funny Shel Silverstein–penned number called “A Boy Named Sue.” Cash’s beloved network variety show exposed a whole new audience to country music. With the help of wife June Carter, Cash was finally winning his lifelong battle against pills and alcohol. After a lifetime filled with death, disaster, and self-destruction, Cash had reason to feel blessed and thankful.

  Cash wanted to give back to a world from which he had taken so very much. According to a radio spot included on the Gospel Road DVD, the film originated with June Carter dreaming of her husband reading from a book while standing proudly on a mountaintop. Years later, Carter’s dream came to fruition: As the framing device for Gospel Road, Cash’s touchingly clumsy homage to the other JC, Cash reads from a Bible on a mountain in Israel.

  Gospel Road opens with a sun rising hypnotically over the Holy Land before Cash, decked out in his customary black, turns directly to the camera and begins talking about the prescient words of the prophet Isaiah. The lines on Cash’s impeccably craggy face tell a million stories of sin and salvation, of lost, whiskey-soaked nights of degradation, and triumphant mornings when the Lord’s healing grace washed his soul clean.

  Cash’s performance reeks of high-school speech class. He recites Isaiah’s words stiffly and theatrically, pausing to peer thoughtfully off-camera, as if contemplating God’s unimaginable glory. Cash talks of would-be saviors long forgotten by history and of the one true savior.

  He ends his opening narration by expounding, “Never a man spoke like this man [Jesus]. Never a man did the things on this earth this man did. And his words were as beautiful as his miracles. To many believers, their last desire is to be baptized in the Jordan River as Jesus was. They kneel at the holy places, places that are holy just because Jesus was there. They walked the way of the cross and shout ‘Praise the Lord,’ and they mean it. Now come along with me in the footsteps of Jesus, and I’ll show you why they do.” Cash raises his hands in a pantomime of religious rapture when he cries, “Praise the Lord!” Then he points conspiratorially at the audience. His performance is all the more powerful for its naked sincerity. He finally has an opportunity to play a fire-breathing preacher, with film as his unlikely medium and the audience as his unseen flock.

  This opening gives the film a scruffy intimacy. We then cut to a shaky helicopter shot that just barely captures Cash flashing the peace sign. Gibson’s Jesus was a warrior-God. The Passion Of The Christ lingered so fetishistically and lovingly over the physical agony of Jesus’ death that it treated his life and teachings as an afterthought. Cash’s savior, in sharp contrast, really is the Prince of Peace. What an incredibly sweet, quixotic way to begin a film about Jesus. Gospel Road’s pre-credit sequence once again finds Cash playing the great uniter sending out coded messages of solidarity to hippies, Jesus freaks, and mainstream Christians alike.

  Cash narrates the film and provides the bulk of its soundtrack. His starkly beautiful voice dominates the film as he documents the life and times of Jesus, who is played as a boy by a shaggy-haired, pale, blond, blue-eyed little scamp (Robert Elfstrom Jr.) who’d look more at home waiting in line for tickets to a Jan And Dean concert than perambulating around Nazareth.

  Consciously or otherwise, Cash and director Robert Elfstrom (who also plays a long-haired, sandal-wearing Nazarene carpenter with some crazy ideas about peace and love) turned Jesus’ story into a religious head film. Elfstrom goes nuts with helicopter shots and prismatic effects; doing freaky shit with light and flares seems as important to him as laying down the Gospel. Cash’s wall-to-wall narration and song score only add to the film’s oddly psychedelic flavor. Gospel Road subscribes to the notion, popular throughout ’70s cinema, that there’s nothing more fascinating than watching a hippie dude wander around with an evocative song as his soundtrack. But this time, the hippie dude in question is Jesus.

  Just as he adopted the form of a coyote and led Homer Simpson on a spiritual journey, Cash leads us on a greatest-hits tour of Jesus’ life and times. We follow the Good Shepherd as he’s baptized by John the Baptist, picks up his entourage of 12 followers who treat him like he’s the first coming or something, is anointed the Son of God, and, to use arcane religious terminology, loses his shit and freaks the fuck out upon discovering moneylenders in the temple. We learn the origin of all of Jesus’ beloved catchphrases, from “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” to “Judge not, lest ye be judged” to “Ask and ye shall receive.”

  Gospel Road offers the gospel according to Johnny Cash. When Cash tells the camera, “Jesus addressed men as men and not as members of any particular class or culture. The differences which divide men, such as wealth, position, education, and so forth, he knew were strictly on the surface,” he seems to be espousing his own radically egalitarian mind-set as much as Jesus’.

  Though it follows Jesus’ life in a linear fashion, Gospel Road frequently gives over to abstraction, as when Cash pontificates on Jesus’ teachings during an endless helicopter shot of water glistening in the sun. Road is all about pretty images and pretty words; it doesn’t particularly matter how the two fit together. In the film’s boldest move, it places the
crucified Jesus and his cross in the middle of a modern city, collapsing the impossible gulf between the past and the present in the process, and underlining the timelessness and contemporary resonance of Jesus’ story and message.

  “I bet Mary Magdalene walked this same beach I’m walking on. I wonder what Mary Magdalene really looked like. The Scriptures don’t tell a lot about her, but what little is told has made her the subject of more speculation and controversy than any woman I’ve ever heard of. Jesus was to suffer much criticism for his association with people of questionable character.” Cash narrates as he walks along the beach, still looking directly into the camera and emphasizing the words “questionable character” in a manner that underlines how directly it applies to him.

  Within the context of the film, Cash didn’t have to wonder what Mary Magdalene looks like, since June Carter plays her. The film never explains why exactly Mary Magdalene has a Southern drawl, or why a novice actor is the only thespian allowed to deliver her own lines, instead of having Cash narrate her story.

  “You know, we can’t forget the fact that Jesus was human,” Cash reminds us in the film’s key line. Gospel Road is ultimately as much about Cash as it is about Jesus. It is a film of trembling earnestness and unquestionable devotion. When Cash reflects on how he likes to imagine children frolicking with his Savior, the film becomes uncomfortably, even unbearably personal. Cash is revealing himself and bearing witness. The coolest motherfucker on the planet is willing to look defiantly uncool if it means saving souls. In this context, it almost seems unfair to criticize the film on aesthetic and artistic grounds, since Gospel Road is intended first and foremost as an evangelizing tool and a profound expression of personal faith.