The Hospital

Plot

At a Manhattan teaching hospital, the life of Dr. Bock (George C. Scott), the Chief of Medicine, is in disarray: his wife has left him, his children don't talk to him, and his once-beloved teaching hospital is falling apart.

The hospital is dealing with the sudden deaths of two doctors and a nurse. These are attributed to coincidental or unavoidable failures to provide accurate treatment.

At the same time, administrators must deal with a protest against the hospital's annexation of an adjacent and decrepit apartment building. The annexation is to be used for a drug rehabilitation center; the building's current occupants demand that the hospital find them replacement housing before the building is demolished despite the building being condemned sometime before.

As Dr. Bock complains of impotence and has thoughts of suicide, he falls in love with Barbara Drummond (Diana Rigg), a patient's daughter who came with her father from Mexico for his treatment. This temporarily gives Dr. Bock something to live for after Barbara confronts him.

The deaths are discovered to have been initiated by Barbara's father (Barnard Hughes), as retribution for the "inhumanity" of modern medical treatment. Drummond's victims would have been saved if they had received prompt, appropriate treatment — but they did not. Dr. Bock and Barbara use a final, accidental death of a doctor at the hospital to cover Drummond's misdeeds. Barbara makes plans to fly her and her father back to Mexico. Dr. Bock at first intends to go with them, but at the last minute insists on staying behind to try to re-organize the hospital so that it will not descend into total chaos.

Cast

Production

It was filmed at Metropolitan Hospital Center in New York.

Box office

The film earned $9 million in North American rentals.

Critical response

When the film was released, film critic Roger Ebert lauded the film, writing, "The Hospital is a better movie than you may have been led to believe. It has been criticized for switching tone in midstream, but maybe it's only heading for deeper, swifter waters. [...] Chayevsky's [sic] bizarre and unexpected ending suggests that men - even madmen - can still use institutions for their own private purpose."

More recently, film critic Dennis Schwartz gave the film a mildly positive review, writing, "The gallows humor was the melodramatic farce's saving grace; the film uses its razor-sharp instruments to cut into the hides of the insensitive institutionalized health care providers like Michael Moore's Sicko does in 2007 to the fat-cat HMOs. My major gripe was that it could have been better, as Chayefsky delivered his part of the bargain and so did Scott; nevertheless the pic flattens out as the director increasingly loses his way in all the bitterness and invented horror stories and leaves us dangling over how to get out of such an irredeemable world (where modern man is perceived as forgotten in death)." The film has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 7.8/10.

Awards

The film won the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the WGA, and the BAFTA for Best Screenplay for Chayefsky's script. Despite having rejected the Oscar the previous year for his work in Patton, Scott was nominated for Best Actor, but the award went instead to Gene Hackman for The French Connection.

At the 22nd Berlin International Film Festival in 1972, the film won the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize.

In 1995, The Hospital was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".