The Great Moment
Field, Betty, Heydt, Louis, Sturges, Preston, McCrea, Joel
Primary Category:
Performing Arts /
Film, TV, Video
Genre: Film
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Annotated by:
- Duffin, Jacalyn
- Date of entry: Jan-28-2008
Summary
In 1868, a man named Eben Frost redeems a medal from a pawn shop and delivers it to a widow, Elizabeth Morton (Betty Field). Twenty years earlier her late husband W.T. Morton had used anesthesia on Frost for a dental procedure.
Flashback two decades, Morton (Joel McCrea) and his wife marry and he struggles in dentistry. Learning of Letheon (ether) from fellow dentist Horace Wells (Louis Jean Heydt), he successfully applies it in his practice for painless tooth extraction. Surgeons are interested but skeptical and want to know the composition. In keeping the simple formula a secret, Morton could become wealthy, but he is prompted to reveal its composition when confronted with a little girl bravely awaiting an operation.
Losing the prospect of gain from ether, he sets his financial hopes on his patented invention of a glass inhaler for administering it. Congress votes him a reward of $100,000, but his patent is infringed and rivals conspire to block justice and rewards. Morton dies young, poor, and unknown.
Flashback two decades, Morton (Joel McCrea) and his wife marry and he struggles in dentistry. Learning of Letheon (ether) from fellow dentist Horace Wells (Louis Jean Heydt), he successfully applies it in his practice for painless tooth extraction. Surgeons are interested but skeptical and want to know the composition. In keeping the simple formula a secret, Morton could become wealthy, but he is prompted to reveal its composition when confronted with a little girl bravely awaiting an operation.
Losing the prospect of gain from ether, he sets his financial hopes on his patented invention of a glass inhaler for administering it. Congress votes him a reward of $100,000, but his patent is infringed and rivals conspire to block justice and rewards. Morton dies young, poor, and unknown.
Primary Source
DVD The Filmaker Connection
Commentary
One rather unique characteristic of this tale of medical discovery, and belying the title, the Great Moment was attended by many lesser moments of pedestrian gloom. Ether had numerous proponents and several earlier public demonstrations, but Warren’s endorsement of Morton’s idea was key to convincing the world. The details of Horace Wells’s tragic end in a New York City jail are glossed over, and the irascible character of the peculiar chemist Charles Jackson indulges in some artistic liberties. The poignant human interest side of the story is tempered by the mundane portrayal of dentistry as small business and the frustrations inherent to owning and profiting from a discovery. A few clumsy attempts at humor appear as if to soften the message: Morton experiments on Frost with the wrong drug and, in a drunken blur, he attempts to anesthetize his own dog.
Nevertheless, many of the leading names in the discovery of anesthesia appear in the film. For students, it is a delightful double introduction to history: both for the mid-nineteenth-century events it portrays and for the mid-twentieth-century moment in which it was made.