"The Hospital" feels like a warm up to "Network," the classic satire that would come out five years later.
Both were written by Paddy Chayefsky and both suffer a little bit from age. But "Network" still feels prescient and sharp as a tack in its lampooning of news media, while "The Hospital" feels messy and confused in its lampooning of...what...the American medical system? America in general?
That's the problem with "The Hospital." I wasn't entirely sure what Chayefsky was criticizing. The movie is at its best, and funniest, when it's a straight up satire about the running of an urban hospital. For example, one of the most memorable scenes is one in which an unfazed nurse wanders around the emergency room obliviously asking bleeding, doubled over patients to fill out insurance forms. But there are all these other plot strands involving the mid-life crisis of the hospital's director (George C. Scott) and his romance with the hippie-dippie daughter of one of the hospital's patients; and protests against the hospital's plan to appropriate housing from poor members of the community; and a mysterious serial killer offing doctors and nurses. This last storyline is tantalizing at first, but Chayefsky wraps it up in a thuddingly literal, murder mystery way, and it turns out to be stupid.
Scott is terrific and received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance, but it's a case of a good performance being hampered by mediocre material. He brilliantly commands the first couple of scenes he's in, but he's eventually undermined by the screenplay and his performance loses impact the longer the movie goes on.
I'm clearly in the minority, though, for thinking that the screenplay is the weakest link in "The Hospital." Chayefsky won the Original Story and Screenplay Oscar in 1971 for this movie.
Grade: C+
Both were written by Paddy Chayefsky and both suffer a little bit from age. But "Network" still feels prescient and sharp as a tack in its lampooning of news media, while "The Hospital" feels messy and confused in its lampooning of...what...the American medical system? America in general?
That's the problem with "The Hospital." I wasn't entirely sure what Chayefsky was criticizing. The movie is at its best, and funniest, when it's a straight up satire about the running of an urban hospital. For example, one of the most memorable scenes is one in which an unfazed nurse wanders around the emergency room obliviously asking bleeding, doubled over patients to fill out insurance forms. But there are all these other plot strands involving the mid-life crisis of the hospital's director (George C. Scott) and his romance with the hippie-dippie daughter of one of the hospital's patients; and protests against the hospital's plan to appropriate housing from poor members of the community; and a mysterious serial killer offing doctors and nurses. This last storyline is tantalizing at first, but Chayefsky wraps it up in a thuddingly literal, murder mystery way, and it turns out to be stupid.
Scott is terrific and received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance, but it's a case of a good performance being hampered by mediocre material. He brilliantly commands the first couple of scenes he's in, but he's eventually undermined by the screenplay and his performance loses impact the longer the movie goes on.
I'm clearly in the minority, though, for thinking that the screenplay is the weakest link in "The Hospital." Chayefsky won the Original Story and Screenplay Oscar in 1971 for this movie.
Grade: C+