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.

In an unusual move, Preston Sturges decided to film "The Great Moment," a movie that tells the story of Dr. Thomas Morton's struggle to be acknowledged for his work in discovering anesthesia. The Sturges 1944 film (shelved for two years) starring Joel McCrea takes the point of view that Morton was a wronged man. In reading up on it, it seems that he was, and that a good deal of "The Great Moment" is accurate, probably until the very end.

Morton is a dentist seeking a way to practice pain-free dentistry. With the help of his mentor, Dr. Jackson, he eventually tries a form of ether that works, and he gives a name to his product. It was successfully used at the Massachusetts General Hospital for the first time in 1846. The problem comes in that, as with many inventions, other people claimed credit. Dr. Horace Wells, with whom Morton had worked, indeed used anesthesia in the form of laughing gas, but had a colossal public failure and after that, continued experimenting. Jackson, who claimed credit for telling Morton about the ether, later claimed he had invented the telegraph and a form of ammunition and was clearly unbalanced. The man who made anesthesia a practical tool of surgery was Morton, but he was unable to obtain a patent, and the fight about who really invented it raged on for years.

Joel McCrea is very likable as Dr. Morton, and Betty Field is wonderful as his long-suffering wife. Harry Carey turns in one of the best performances as Dr. Warren, the doctor who lets Morton use anesthesia on his patient. William Demarest plays a dental patient who has a pain-free surgery and after that, aligns with Morton. He's actually there more for comic relief.

"The Great Moment" works backwards, starting at the end and working through until Dr. Morton "ruins himself for a servant girl" - you'll be wondering what that's about all through the film. Actually, from my research, that part is pure hooey, and that's not why Dr. Morton lost control of his invention. The film is an uneasy mix of comedy and drama and, unlike other Sturges films, is a downer. Apparently this version isn't his cut. Sturges fans will be disappointed. I have to say, I was intrigued.

This film is notorious for having been butchered by the studio and shelved for two years (the trailer awkwardly tries to pass it off as another Sturges comedy); atypically for him, it’s a medical biopic on the lines of Warner Bros,’ similar films of a few years earlier – and, therefore, more serious than usual (in fact, the few comedy elements here seem like a distraction to the unfolding drama).

I own a volume of Sturges’ scripts – including the original version of this one, called TRIUMPH OVER PAIN (the book from which it derived also inspired the latter-day Boris Karloff vehicle CORRIDORS OF BLOOD [1958]!), which is certainly his most ambitious project; I had read it some years ago and recall it being quite complexly structured: what remains of the film is pretty straightforward, other than adopting a flashback framework (to which it doesn’t even return at the end!). Still, as it stands, it’s hardly a disaster (if undeniably choppy and rushed): fascinating as much for its plot about the inception of anesthesia by a forgotten small-town doctor, W.T.G. Morton, which many a fellow doctor tried to claim as their own invention, as for its handsome and meticulous recreation of an era (recalling Orson Welles’ equally compromised THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS [1942]).

The cast includes a few of Sturges’ renowned stock company: star Joel McCrea (in their third consecutive collaboration) is well-cast in the lead; William Demarest appears as his comic sidekick (the doctor’s first painless client – repeatedly, he starts to recount his experience but each time succeeding in going no further than the first couple of phrases!); Porter Hall (as the somewhat patronizing American President); Franklin Pangborn (in a brief role as secretary to an esteemed doctor whom McCrea wants to test his formula); Jimmy Conlin (the chemist who sells McCrea the ‘miraculous’ ether); Torben Meyer (an irascible doctor who is urgently called in to treat a patient administered an overdose of laughing gas – more on this later).

The remaining actors include: Betty Field as Morton’s long-suffering wife (whose limited role is often relegated to the sidelines, at least in this version); Harry Carey (dignified as the surgeon who regrets the barbaric methods he’s forced to use while operating on his patients); Louis Jean Heydt (as an arrogant young student who uses laughing gas for desensitization, but whose experiment goes comically awry); Grady Sutton (this W.C. Fields regular appears in one of only two overtly slapsticky scenes as the recipient of the laughing gas – the other involves McCrea’s first attempt to extract Demarest’s tooth, which renders him temporarily crazed and sends him crashing through the window into the street below!); Edwin Maxwell (the usual authoritarian role, in this case a colleague of Carey’s who indirectly stoops to blackmail in order to force McCrea to reveal the secret ingredient of his formula – which the latter was concealing, as a means of protection, only so long as the “Letheon” invention was officially patented).

Sturges, obviously, is all for the hero who has to face up to a general wave of both ignorance and prejudice, not to mention centuries of savage medical tradition; in fact, as depicted in the film, the students seem to treat daily grueling operations almost as another form of entertainment! The film rises to a number of good dramatic moments (usually seeing McCrea in confrontation with someone or other) – especially powerful, however, are Carey’s first successful operation with an anesthetized patient (and his surprised but enthusiastic approval of the procedure) and the ending, complete with moody lighting and religious music, as Morton compassionately approaches the next ‘victim’ of established science…when the doors of reason, as it were, are suddenly flung open and the painless method is accepted into its fold.

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.

Decidedly odd, you might think, coming from Preston Sturges but then again, perhaps not as the idiosyncratic Sturges seldom stuck to 'conventional' genre pictures; even his screw-ball comedies were more perverse than what was the norm in Hollywood at the time, so this biopic of the man who discovered anesthesia for use in the dental profession is a far cry from the usual Hollywood biopic, (even the subject is obscure and unlikely). Not, of course, is it necessarily any better for that. It's a slight, disingenuous little picture veering uneasily from drama to comedy without making much of an inroad either way.

Joel McCrea, (blander than usual), is the crusading dentist, (sic), and Betty Field, the wife who eggs him on. Some of the Sturges stock company pop up in sundry supporting parts, (noticeably William Demarest), but none make much of an impression. They, like the film, remain largely inoffensive. Not a failure, precisely, but a blip nevertheless.