Huh? 'The Hospital' Movie Review

Netflix has the habit of recommending rather odd choices which one might never see in a Blockbuster, so I take its quirky selections (and those made by my family) in stride. In previous reviews on this site I have come up with a simple bifuricative dichotomy for films. The first label is 'overhyped', that is, being undeserving of the slavish attention given to it (see my review of Blue Velvet or the recent Star Trek film, for example). The opposite would then be 'underhyped', and while I have not yet partaken of such a film and written about it, I'm not so much a cold-hearted cynic that I would say such a film does not exist.

Yet I have now found that a third such classification must exist, a bucket to catch the esoteric drops of water that cannot be contained by the simple two-party system of my original design. I will label this area the 'Huh?' classification, for such films at various parts of their duration often elicit a snort of derision or plain confusion. These films may be the greatest film on earth, or else worse that whatever numbered Saw film is out in the multiplexes these days, but they defy simple categorization by hype.

And the first grant entry into this newly-christened hall of inscrutability is the 1971 film The Hospital (IMDB). A black comedy, the movie stars George C. Scott (well renowned in my family by his centerplace in the annual christmas tradition of watching 1984's splendid adaptation of A Christmas Carol) as Dr. Herbert Block, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking former wunderkind who is now split from his wife and entertains suicidal thoughts in between cursing his hippy no-good children he has cast off. His deepening depression dovetails nicely with a sudden rash of hospital staff deaths; one stud intern is mistakenly labeled a patient and dies from insulin shock, while another doctor is beaten with a sandbag and dies neglected of a heart attack. These deaths only serve to further demonstrate the incompetency and shortfalls of the hospital, one of the premier institutions in the world--and in here the black comedy aspect is clearly seen. Feeling his life is meaningless these days, Block is feeling rather impotent in a literal and metaphorical sense and is ready to jump the line with a potassium overdose if not for the intervention of the intelligent-yet-scatterbrained Barbara Drummond who is trying to get her comatose father out of the hospital and back to the Mexican Indian reservation where he's been running around as a missionary. Sexy times follow and soon Block is considering going back with the very young Babs while the body count rises.

In many ways, The Hospital sets itself up as a mystery, but that element is rather quickly dropped in favor of extended monologues by Drummond and Block about the respective failings of their lives. In fact the whodunit aspect of the film is forgotten for roughly 60% of the film and then haphazardly slapped back in with breathless exposition by the culprit (I won't spoil it.) In that respect, it fails horribly as a film. As a black comedy it actually fares little better. It's ironic that The Hospital grapples with the same bureaucraticc and moneyminded failings of our health care system that Michael Moore claims to have discovered in his "documentaries". At one point Block rants out the window that despite being able to clone people "like carrots", half the people in the nearby condemned ghetto are not immunized for polio. "We keep getting sicker!" he exclaims, and the sober fact is he's right, close to four decades after the fact. If that isn't a downer I don't know what is.

The film did garner an Academy Award for best screenplay, and that is the redeeming feature of the film. Despite being a cobbled-together mishmash of incompetency, singularly unpleasant individuals, chaos, constant cacophony and the like, George C Scott's dialogue and his delivery are outstanding. The comic jabs are razor sharp, the sad truths plainly spoken in an eloquently tight way. While I didn't feel I got much out of the film at the end, I did realize that going back I could probably learn a lot from the craft of writing that went into it. That's a redeeming feature, if a rather odd one, but with its utter randomness, I feel justified in awarding The Hospital my first "huh" of this year. Enjoy it, fellas'.