The Great Moment

Now this...This is a weird film. Preston Sturges, known very well and paid very well for his ability to write and direct comedies, takes on a biopic of Dr. W. T. Morton, the dentist who reportedly was the first to use ether as an anesthetic. Morton seems like a curious case study because of the rancor around whether he, Dr. Charles Jackson, or Dr. Horace Wells came up with it first combined with the fact that he didn't actually invent anything while also including all of the contradictory ideas about him protecting his practice banging up against his desire to be a humanitarian. It's a mix that could be a complex portrait of a man, the invention of a new application of an existing compound, and the historical period, but Sturges doesn't go for complex. He goes for hagiography, and it's just...weird.

The first thing that's off about this film is the structure. One common positive attribute of every film Sturges had made up to this point what his extreme command of structure. Three acts, each taking up almost exactly a third of the film, filled with character and action, feeding from one to the next towards a conclusion. The opening here, though, is a whiplash back and forth in time as the credits show Morton (Joel McCrea) at the height of his fame followed by scenes of Eben Frost (William Demarest) visiting the widowed Mrs. Morton (Betty Field) after Dr. Morton's death which leads to Mrs. Morton reminiscing about when she and Dr. Morton first met when he was a boarder at her mother's boarding house. It also jumps forward to after Morton's victory when he visits President Franklin Pierce Porter Hall) to ask him to sign a bill that would award him $100,000 for his contribution to medicine. It's honestly a weird way to start things, and it's so completely out of character for how Sturges wrote movies that I have to wonder what drove him to make it like this.

Anyway, the main thrust of the film is Dr. Morton dropping out of medical school because he doesn't have the funds and becoming a dentist. The historical side of things that I probably find most interesting (besides a dramatic appearance of President Pierce who...this has got to be pretty unique, huh?) is the view of dentists as almost the scum of the medical word in the early half of the 19th century. It doesn't get the most focus, but it's interesting nonetheless, just popping up from time to time as reason to dismiss Morton from more respected medical professionals.

That being said, Morton has the same problem as every other dentist: dental work is painful and there's no good way to prevent the pain. A fellow dental student, Dr. Wells (Louis Jean Heydt) tries to use nitrous oxide, much to the objection of Morton's old medical school teacher Dr. Jackson (Julius Tannen) because it will just suffocate the patient to knock them out. It's through Jackson's meandering thoughts about the use and properties of ether that Morton accidentally comes up with using sulfuric ether inhalations to knock people out safely.

Now, this isn't a straight drama from Sturges. He obviously can't ignore the impulse to deliver comedy where he can, and while it does provide some of the weird tonal imbalances in the film, these moments are probably the heights of the film. The biggest moment is Morton trying out the compound for the first time on Frost, having gotten an impure mixture from the chemist that caused a drunken and violent effect on his patient rather than a sleeping effect. It's a showcase for Demarest to just go nuts, and it's an entertaining little sequence.

The central conflict within Morton that the movie never really addresses is the idea that he's keeping the use of ether a secret (calling it letheon) in order to protect his business but he wants to give it to hospitals for free for the betterment of humanity. If he ends up giving away industrial sized amounts of letheon to hospitals across the world...will he be able to pay for that? And it's there because Sturges, adapting a book by René Fülöp-Miller, never even comes close to the idea that maybe Morton was less responsible for the use of ether than he ever said. This is where a more-serious minded approach to the material might have worked, using a critical eye to look at the amorphous nexus of invention around an existing compound and properties already described in medical textbooks. Instead, Sturges leans heavily into the idea of Morton being a secular saint free of critique other than he loved too much.

The ending is really weird, too. I mean, not just from the image which is all proto-religious of Morton essentially being a gift from God to help a girl about to go under the knife despite the medical community's rightful resistance to using an unknown compound during procedures, but also in terms of the actual movement of plotting. We don't get a whole lot of time with it, the film cutting to credits right as a door opens and Morton gets welcomed with open arms, but it doesn't make sense. He's been sent away because they won't use his compound, and he just shows up and they welcome him openly? It honestly just doesn't make sense.

So, this is the first real stumble of Sturges' directing career. It's a weird mix of heavy drama, biopic, hagiography, and comedy that never comes together. It works best in the comedic space, but that never holds for more than a few minutes at a time, forgotten for much longer in between moments. The historical angle is interesting, but far from the focus. The hagiography is a mess and is the focus, and it doesn't work.

I mean, it's helped by the fact that it's a grant 81 minutes long and has some chuckles along the way, but this is really just...weird.

From The Great McGinty until leaving Paramount at the close of World War II, Preston Sturges created a stream of comedy classics, some of the funniest moments ever put on film. His one failure while he was at Paramount was this film, The Great Moment.

Paramount had Sturges under contract and as such he had to do their bidding and on this occasion the studio required of him to direct this biographical film of the life of William T.G. Morton, the alleged inventor of ether.

From their point of view it was one odd choice to direct a biographical film like The Story of Louis Pasteur or Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. What possessed the studio brains to select Sturges? On the other hand Sturges did have a lot of creative freedom at Paramount so why didn't he just take one for the team and direct a straight forward biography?

He did neither and the film had stalwart Joel McCrea as the dentist who demonstrated the first public use of ether during surgery. Betty Field was his long suffering wife in an earnest, but rather dull biographical study. It's not even that Morton was that noble because there were other claims by people who were working along the same lines as he. It all amounts to a confusing story.

William Demarest was a player beloved of Preston Sturges and he appeared in all of his Paramount films. He does so here as a man who was willing to be experimented on by McCrea. When McCrea gives him a dose of the wrong stuff the results are hilarious, but oh so out of place in this type of film.

For those who love Preston Sturges's comedies as I do, this is one to stay away from.

Every book or play or movie based on history is bound to give only part of the story, and THE GREAT MOMENT is no exception. Preston Sturgis was one of the masters of sound film comedy in the 1940s, which sharp satires like THE GREAT McGINTY, SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, and THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK. But he wanted to try something more serious - a biography of Dr. William Morton, the dentist who popularized the use of anesthesia (nitrous oxide) in operations. The film was shot in 1942, when Sturgis was reaching the height of his rocket-like career. But the management of Paramount was not satisfied with the film as Sturgis cut it, for he ended the story on a tragic note (that Morton never did benefit by his great discovery, and died impoverished and in disgrace). It was not an up-beat ending, and as Sturgis was known for comedies his film had to be up-beat. They re-cut the film as it remains today, and it ends (illogically) in the middle, with Morton's first triumphant use of nitrous oxide in an operation in 1846. To add to the film's tribulations there was a two year backlog of Hollywood films in 1942, so it was not released until 1944. It did moderate business, and did not aid Sturgis's faltering career at that point.

As it is, the film is not uninteresting, and shows that Sturgis would have had funny sections in the film (William Demerest's reaction to ether, for example). But it is based on a book that paints Morton as the hero of the "Conquest of Pain", relegating Drs. Horace Wells and Charles Jackson to background/villain roles. It's more complex than the surviving film suggests. Nitrous oxide had been known as a gas with odd properties for some time. In 1800 Sir Humphrey Davy, the famous British Chemist, suggested (somewhat inadvertently) it might be used by surgeons. But it was the drug of choice for decades in Europe and American, for a quick, pleasant (but dangerous) high. In THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, Michael Caine's character uses ether to get high when depressed, and it eventually kills him.

Dr. Horace Wells, a dentist from Connecticut, first got the idea of using ether for surgery in the U.S. However, he was not an effective demonstrator, and his attempt to show it before doctors only ended in dismissal and ridicule because the subject (although totally oblivious to pain) moaned while asleep. The audience thought he was hurting. Morton had worked as a dentist with Wells. He continued studying ether, and finally perfected a method of demonstrating it. He was better at demonstrations. But he had to share the secret with Dr. Charles Jackson, who helped him get the supplies of nitrous oxide. An agreement with Jackson was to allow them to share the credit. But Morton (who had an unscrupulous side, not shown in the movie) tried to patent nitrous oxide as "Letheon". It seems that legally one cannot patent natural gases, but Morton added another gas to the nitrous oxide to make the odor less unpleasant. He thought this would create a binding patent. It didn't, and his many attempts to get it patented never succeeded. The film makes it look like Morton did get it finally, when President Franklin Pierce (played by Porter Hall here - who does not look like that handsome weakling) signed a law recognizing Morton's claim. That did not settle the issue in Morton's favor.

None of the three men did well by their joint discovery. Wells became (like Michael Caine in CIDER HOUSE RULES) an addict, and committed suicide in a New York City jail in 1847. Morton actually did have a better career than Wells (in 1849 he gave testimony at the trial of Dr. John Webster for the murder of Dr. George Parkman at Harvard - testimony identifying a jaw as Dr. Parkman's which helped convict Webster). He died in 1868 (also in New York City) still trying to prove title to "Letheon". Jackson made a career of distinction in geology circles, but he kept claiming credit for inventions by other people (Samuel Morse's telegraph, some devices of Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institute). He finally died in a madhouse in 1880.

Given the savage results of their fates, one wishes the "downer" version of the film still existed to see how Sturgis might have handled the story. But he still would have made Morton look better than his character fully deserved.

By the way, while Wells, Morton, and Jackson fought for credit for "letheon" in Massachusetts, in Athens, Georgia Dr. Crawford Long had done occasional minor surgery on patients using nitrous oxide. Long, a quiet, honorable country practitioner, wrote about it in some local journals. He never blew his horn about his "great moment". Instead, he lived and died a respected doctor and neighbor. Mark Twain mentioned how "a Northern slicker" (Morton, probably) had stolen the credit from Dr. Long. Oddly enough, the U.S. Postal Service agreed. In 1942, as part of their "Great American Issue" of stamps, among the five scientists was Dr. Long, as the inventor/discover of anesthesia. Apparently no comments by Sturgis about this stamp have ever turned up. One wonders what he thought about it.

The Great Moment, as I'm sure you know, is not a typical Preston Sturges movie. It is a historical drama with a few comic moments, all of which are clunky (although a couple of the stranger ones are so bizarre they're entertaining in a way, especially when Morton tries to knock out his dog with ether). The film might actually have been quite great if the comedy were subtracted completely. Yeah, I know, we're talking Sturges here. But Sturges was a great dramatic director, too. See The Great McGinty if you don't believe me - the comedy there is less than in many of his other films, and the drama is more pronounced. Most often, Sturges was a master of mixing both dramatic and comedic moments. All of his films were like that. The Great Moment has an excellent story at its core. A dentist - he was in medical school, but he ran out of money and had to earn his living as a dentist - wants to find a way to knock out his patients before he pulls teeth. He does so with ether. He also has aspirations to introduce the use of ether into the medical profession. These intentions are noble, but his patent hasn't come through and he feels the guilt of every painful operation. You see, the AMA will not allow doctors to use Letheon (his name for it) unless they know exactly what it is. But as soon as he tells, everyone will know, and his discovery will go unrecognized.

The film actually has a very good structure. It begins in medias res, with Morton (Joel McCrea, who is very good in the film) being advised on how to proceed legally to attain a patent. In taking these steps, he ruins his career and reputation. The rest of the film is the buildup to the loss of his secret. The final scene is very powerful. 7/10.

One other small reason you should see this: Franklin Pangborn has the funniest facial hair in this film! Grady Sutton also has a really funny scene.

I can't add much to wmorrow59's excellent summary. It caught the strengths and weaknesses of this film and provided excellent historical background. Be sure to read it.

This film is only worth watching if you're a Preston Sturges fanatic (like me) and are willing to sit through his one failure as well as his many triumphs. I have a hunch that the studio meddling accounts for much of the trouble -- the movie's pace and structure are erratic at best -- but I also fear that our man Preston may have wandered too far from his natural path as a filmmaker. This is no buried treasure. Sturges's cut may have been an improvement, but I don't see the makings of a good movie here. The dialogue is weird when it isn't plain awful, the protagonist is a pigheaded dimwit, and the moments of slapstick are wildly misplaced.

If you buy Turner's incredible 7-film Sturges box set, do so for the other six titles -- all of them masterpieces.