Of course, Chayefsky’s crowning career achievement was his screenplay for Network, the landmark 1976 satire about television. But five years earlier, audiences got a taste of where Chayefsky was heading creatively with this, a comparably edgy film serving as an angry middle finger flipped directly at the medical establishment.
Chayefsky captured best screenplay Oscars for both scripts.
The Hospital Spotlights Chayefsky Speeches
The film features the screenwriter’s famously magnificent speeches -- diatribes few real human beings could ever deliver extemporaneously. They help make The Hospital a movie of Big Ideas not confined merely to medicine but also about a collision of cultures.
The Hospital and Network are comparable in tone and structure. The leading men in both are Chayefsky surrogates -- accomplished, respected, middle-aged white men whose outward cynicism mask the embers of idealism. In Network, William Holden is the last angry man of TV news; in The Hospital we follow George C. Scott as the world-weary chief of surgery at a run-amok New York City hospital.
Both films also share a healthy contempt for the so-called New Morality of the late 60s and early 70s, portraying street activists as loudmouth hypocrites.
Paddy Chayefsky and David Mamet Among Few Film Writers With Real Clout
Chayefsky is best when taking on hallowed institutions with his distinctive hard-eyed vigor. Chayefsky was the David Mamet of his day – brilliant, angry, stubborn and with enough clout to ensure no one could change so much as a punctuation mark of his script.
Like Mamet, by the 1970s Chayefsky also had acquired the rare power to approve directors, casting and virtually all major decisions on his movies.
The Hospital’s script grew out of the real-life frustrations Chayefsky endured when his wife was treated for a neurological disorder. It follows the respected Dr. Herb Bock (George C. Scott), the clinically depressed chief of surgery at a Manhattan hospital run amok. His marriage is ending; he’s estranged from his grown children; he claims to be impotent; the hospital is in profound and perpetual turmoil; and he has lost faith in the healing powers of modern medicine.
Add in a series of mystifying murders throughout the hospital, plus a recurring mob of screaming community protesters marching on (and into) the facility. It’s no wonder the good doctor is seriously considering suicide.
Arthur Hiller, fresh off the smash hit Love Story, directed the film, reportedly bowing to most if not all of Chayefsky's forceful instructions.
George C. Scott Delivers Powerful Chayefskian Rant
Chayefsky’s characters always get great speeches. In Network, Peter Finch won a posthumous Oscar in great part due to the justly-famous “I’m as mad as hell” rant. In The Hospital, George C. Scott is granted one of the great tirades of 1970s cinema, screamed out an open window into the black anonymity of a New York night:
“Transplants. Anti-bodies. We manufacture genes. We can produce birth ectogenetically. We can practically clone people like carrots. And half the kids in this ghetto haven’t been inoculated for polio. We have established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived. And people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing!
Co-Star Diana Rigg at Center of Controversial Rape Scene
The Hospital shares an unfortunate kinship with another iconic 70s film, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. In each, a woman is raped -- with the clear implication she wanted it! In The Hospital, the “victim” is sexy co-star Diana Rigg, still best known as Mrs. Peel in TV’s The Avengers. Here she’s cast as a glib intellectual who has forsaken modern American life for a primitive tribal existence in Mexico. She shamelessly flirts with the suicidal George C. Scott, then enjoys his assault. The final shot in the scene is a close-up of Rigg’s secret smile, mirroring that of Susan George in the Peckinpah film.
Besides the serious creep factor, the resulting post-rape romance between them just isn’t very credible, especially for Scott’s character. It’s the only story element in the film that does not work.
Nancy Marchand of TV's Lou Grant and The Sopranos in Supporting Role
The Hospital’s remarkable cast includes a parade of excellent supporting players, many of whom later became series television fixtures, including Nancy Marchand, Robert Walden, Frances Sternhagen, Katherine Helmond, Richard Dysart, Barnard Hughes (in a dual role), Roberts Blossom and Stephen Elliott, among others.
The film came out just months after Scott famously refused the best actor Oscar for Patton. The star’s drinking was legendary and according to TCM’s Robert Osborne, Scott proved so unreliable during The Hospital’s production that he was nearly replaced. Luckily, he wasn’t, because his performance is superb, striking just the right balance of raw power and mournful introspection that helps his character, Dr. Herb Bock, linger in the memory.
The Hospital is a powerful piece of storytelling that remains as timely as ever, especially in the current, poisoned political discourse over the American health care system.
Barry M. Grey - Barry M. Grey is a non-fiction TV writer-producer in Los Angeles whose love of classic film borders on the dangerously obsessive.
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