Reeling Backward: The Great Moment (1944)

The studio didn't care for Preston Sturges' biography of the (maybe) inventor of anesthesia, shelved the picture for two years and then hacked it to pieces.

Preston Sturges, then the king of Golden Age of Hollywood comedies, was keen to do a movie about the life of Dr. William T. Morgan, a Boston dentist who was (briefly) celebrated for inventing a way to perform painless surgery. The studio was not.

Paramount let him shoot it anyway — because he was Preston Sturges — but disliked the picture so much they shelved it for two years. The studio honchos didn’t care for the comedic approach to a medical biography, preferring the reverential tone of dramas like “The Story of Louis Pasteur.” And they were put off by Sturges’ admittedly confusing flashback structure, which is reminiscent of “Citizen Kane.”

“The Great Moment” was finally released in 1944 after several title changes and drastic re-edits by the studio that brought its runtime down to an emaciated 81 minutes. Sturges still embraced the film, content to let his celebration of an unheralded man be told, even if in a very different form than he originally intended.

Based upon the book “Triumph Over Pain” by René Fülöp-Miller, the movie did have the doubtless intended effect of reviving the reputation of Morton, who was very much seen as a greedy, dastardly figure in his day. After successfully demonstrating the use of sulphuric ether vapor to put patients to sleep in 1846, he spent much of the rest of his life fighting for recognition and remuneration for his discovery, without success.

Today Morton is generally accepted as the father of anesthesia, or at least one of the parents.

As played by Joel McCrea, Morton is depicted as a clever, striving young man of little means. He is forced to drop out of Harvard Medical School due to a lack of funds, though he manages to woo and wed the daughter of his landlord, Elizabeth (Betty Field).

Owing to the film’s opening sequence with Morton’s passing, we know he died a pauper, sustaining his family through farming. Indeed, his old friend Eben Frost (William Demarest) comes across one of the medals he was awarded for his discovery in a pawn shop window, doubtless sold to keep the family in feed, and buys it to return to Elizabeth.

Despite this tragic starting note, the main section of the story is notable for its fast-paced dialogue and humorous repartee, with McCrea largely playing the straight man. It’s not quite “His Girl Friday,” but it’s closer to that than “Kane.”

After becoming a dentist as a fallback — a not-uncommon avenue for failed medical students of the day — Morton struggles to get his practice going. He assists another would-be doctor and friend, Horace Wells (Louis Jean Heydt), who is trying to invent a way to perform painless surgery using laughing gas (nitrous oxide).

But the two are made laughingstocks during a demonstration at Harvard, where the subject goes into a clownish tizzy and punches Wells in the mouth.

Morton more or less accidentally discovers the anesthetic effect of sulphuric ether when he loves a bottle near the fireplace, and its low boiling point results in it emitting a vapor that puts him into such a stupor that Elizabeth, upon finding him passed out the next morning, assumes he is drunk.

He whips up a device to make inhaling the ether easier and tries it out on Frost as his first patient. Instead it causes him to go into crazy frenzy, jumping out the window and causing a row. Upon consulting with his imperious former medical professor, Charles Jackson (Julius Tannen), Morton learns that he needs to use the highly rectified (more concentrated) version of sulphuric ether, not the common drug store variety.

Voila! It works, and seemingly overnight — certainly in the course of a very short movie montage — Morton becomes fabulously wealthy. To hide his discovery from copycats, he names the ether Letheum and applies for a patent.

Trouble arises when Morton reaches for that proverbial star, attempting to convince a famous surgeon, Professor Warren (Harry Carey) that his Letheum can also be used for medical procedures.

Remember, at this time even the most invasive surgeries were performed on a waking person, shrieking or biting down on a block of wood while a doctor poked around their innards or sawed off a limb. A brief scene, as graphic as allowable at the time, demonstrates the daunting situation, which inflicted tremendous pain while also severely limiting the length and types of procedures surgeons could attempt with a flailing patient strapped down to a table.

The demonstration with one of Warren’s patients is a complete success, and Morton is celebrated with literal street parades and public feting. But the powers-that-be, represented as the Massachusetts Medical Association, decide the anesthetic can’t be ethically used without knowing its chemical composition.

Especially one coming from a lowly tooth-puller!

He’s confronted with a choice: reveal his secret and benefit the entire medical world and cease the suffering of millions, but lose his fortune. After meeting a servant girl who’s about to undergo amputation, he makes the fateful, selfless decision.

Further complicating things, Jackson and Wells, jealous of Morton’s success, sue him for stealing their ideas. Other scientists come forward, claiming they’d already used ether or other chemicals to put people to sleep years earlier. The case goes on a long and byzantine jag, with the president himself offering to sign a $100,000 moratorium for Morton if sues some military physician for patent infringement, which instantly turns him into a public pariah.

All of this stuff mentioned in the paragraph above is actually the beginning of the movie, and is dispensed with quickly in a puzzling mishmash that glosses over his years of anguish, then jumps ahead years later to his death. I can see why Sturges did this, given his natural instinct toward a light touch: get the grim stuff out of the way so the story can have more bounce.

Unfortunately, between Sturges’ jumpy time-cuts and the studios’ hatchet butchery with their own editing, the movie is often out of balance and tonally chaotic.

Here’s the thing: Morton’s claims on scientific genius were, by his own admission, rather thin. It’s one thing to create a substance that renders surgery painless, and quite another to learn that a common chemical has a beneficial side effect nobody else had fully explored. And then he had the audacity to try and patent it so no one else could benefit without paying him.

Morton was hardly the selfless saint lauded in “The Great Moment.” But he deserves to be recognized for his place in medical history, which Sturges accomplishes in this odd, disjointed but entertaining film.

It’s now out in a new Blu-ray issue from Kino Lorber.