The Hospital

Paddy Chayefsky's zeitgeist-typical excoriation of the American public health system piles on systemic blunder after blunder, mixes it with a madman on the loose killing hospital staff and tops it with George C. Scott depressed, alcoholic hospital administrator and Diana Rigg as a flower-power nympho who gets turned on when he rapes her in his office.  Meanwhile earnest counter-culturalists demonstrate against the hospital’s expansionary appropriation of lower class black homes.

All this might have come across as on-the-money social criticism in the pot-drenched '70s but now it is more the stuff off comedy (the modern incarnation is television's Scrubs). The pity from this perspective is that the film is not even unintentionally funny. Scott, who was nominated for an Oscar, gives his role his usual powerhouse treatment but by the time we get to the big plot reveal the film is so over-the-top with puffed-up posturing that it cannot be taken seriously and degenerates into the simply ludicrous.

Chayefsky, who actually won an Oscar for his script took a similar approach to the media five years later and got somewhat better result (insofar as it is still watchable) with Sidney Lumet as director on Network.

Available from: Shock Entertainment

 

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