Initially, The Hospital (1971) it was promoted as a black comedy. That term often signals paucity of mirth, albeit with an intellectual veneer. It was also offered as a farce. Again, warning lights go off, as the term farce is generously employed to blanket narrative confusion.
The film was written by Paddy Chayevsky—so it’s loaded with social critique, abrupt tone shifts and marathon soliloquies.
George C. Scott doesn’t know he’s in a farce, let alone a black comedy. Maybe he doesn’t care. He approaches the part of Dr. Herbert Bock, the chief of medicine in a New York City teaching hospital, as if burdened with the gut-punch anguish of a Eugene O’Neill character in recovery. He can’t overstate the part, à la ‘Dr. Strangelove’, in which he appeared as General Buck Turgidson. He can’t power his way through, as he did in ‘Patton’. So, he plays it hungover and embittered—and that’s not necessarily healthy for black comedy or farce. Plus, his many discussions about suicide don’t add to the festivities.
Dr Bock is impotent, his wife has left the nest, and his children aren’t speaking to him. Okay, there could be laughs coming… His hospital is suffering from a recent run of inexplicable deaths. During these routine setbacks, Bock is romantically involved with a younger woman, Barbara, played by Diana Rigg, whose father is a patient. As Barbara restores Bock’s will to live—somewhat too quickly (but hey, that could be ‘farcical’)— it turns out that the hospital deaths are murders. Oh yes, the film was also promoted as a ‘mystery’—so it’s a black comedy, farcical mystery… a lot genres.
As the film rolls down a stream to a precipice, it becomes glaringly obvious that there’s way too much narrative cargo. The plot can barely float. Navigation is lost. Director Arthur Hiller never gets a firm hand on the keel, as Robert Altman does, for instance, in M*A*S*H* (a hospital-based black comedy that actually works).
The film has attracted a minor cult status mainly due to its aggressive ineptitude. Given the collective talent—director, writer, actors— it should work at a baseline level. A few generations of film students have studied the film as an example of the difficulty in achieving harmony across a multi-genre script.
In the end, we are left with the film too obvious in its social condemnations, too cartoonish in its interpersonal relationships, and too didactic to be funny in any sense. But in different hands, that sounds like a good foundation for a farcical black comedy mystery.
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