The Hospital (1971)

Actors: Frances Sternhagen (actress), Diana Rigg (actress), Katherine Helmond (actress), Tracey Walter (actor), Barnard Hughes (actor), Arthur Hiller (director), Stephen Elliott (actor), Stockard Channing (actress), Sab Shimono (actor), George C. Scott (actor), Dennis Dugan (actor), Christopher Guest (actor), Richard Dysart (actor), Don Record (miscellaneous crew), Robert Walden (actor),

Plot: Herbert Bock is chief of medicine in a major teaching hospital. His wife has left him, he is impotent and his children have both disowned him. He is toying with the idea of suicide when patients begin dying, not from complications, but from the erroneous treatments the Hospital is giving them. People in the wrong beds are given wrong medicines, sent to operating theaters for incorrect surgery, and found in waiting rooms dead of natural causes. Barbara Drummond has come to take her comatose father back to the Sioux reservation where he operates a clinic and they each reach out to each other for emotional support, as a shadowy figure stalks the patients and staff of the hospital.

Keywords: anti-hero, black-comedy, chaos, cynicism, dead-doctor, dead-nurse, dead-patient, death-on-operating-table, doctor, drugs
Genres: Comedy, Drama, Mystery,
Taglines: Madness, Murder and Malpractice. Watch them operate! I may be crazy, but I think I've operated on the wrong patient. Behind the lab coat beats the heart of a man who's been pushed to the edge.

Quotes:

Edmund Drummond: So at 9:15 this morning I rang for my nurse...::Bock: Rang for your nurse?::Edmund Drummond: To ensure one full hour of uninterrupted privacy.::Bock: Good.

Herbert Bock: I mean, where do you train your nurses, Mrs. Christie - Dachau?

Herbert Bock: Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?

Herbert Bock: We've established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived... and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing!

Herbert Bock: You know, when I say impotent, I don't mean merely limp. When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being... my purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved.

Edmund Drummond: I am the fool for Christ, and Paraclete of Caborca.

Barbara: I have a thing about middle-aged men.::Bock: I admire your candor.::Barbara: You've been admiring a lot more than that.

Barbara: It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much.

Herbert Bock: It is all rubbish isn't it. I mean... transplants, anti-bodies, we can produce birth ectogenetically, we can clone people like carrots, and half the kids in this ghetto haven't been inoculated for polio. We have established an enormous medical entity and we're sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal, nothing! The whole goddamn wretched world, strangulating in front of our eyes.

Edmund Drummond: This is Dr. Ives. He's in the Nephrology Lab. I was in there a little while ago, and he was suddenly taken ill, and I thought I'd better get him over here right away. He had at that time perhaps an hour to live. Prompt treatment would have saved his life. As a staff doctor, he was seen without preliminaries... His vital signs were taken, an electrocardiogram... which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history... and then he was promptly... simply... forgotten to death.