The Hospital

The Hospital


Produced in 1971, The Hospital was shown to a mixed critical reception when released in the
summer of 1972.  The screenplay by “Paddy” Chayefsky was generally admired, although some critics complained about uncertainty in the film’s tone – the movie veers between farce and tragedy.  Nonetheless, Chayefsky won an Oscar for his script in 1972, one of three times that he received an academy award for his film writing.  Chayefsky’s influence on the picture is decisive.  The Hospital is probably best viewed as Chayefsky’s creation.  Indeed, the film is credited as “Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital.”


‘Paddy’ Chayefksy

Sidney Aaron Chayefsky is the archetypal tough New York Jewish writer.  (Chayefsky would not like this description; he tended to punch people in the face who put him in the “ghetto” of Jewish writers.)   He was son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, born and raised in the Bronx.  After High School, he fought in World War II and was seriously wounded by a landmine near Aachen.  Hard-working and highly creative, Chayefsky spent his recuperation in England writing a musical.  (He was a lifelong member of ASCAP and had several hit songs to his credit).

“Paddy” was an army nickname.  The moniker reflects Chayefsky’s ambivalence about being Jewish.  There are two accounts as to how he was nicknamed.  In one story, Chayefsky asked to be excused from early morning duty so that, as an observant Catholic, he attend Mass – after making this excuse, his sergeant called him “Paddy” thereafter.  In the other story, Chayefsky declined to eat pork served to him in the mess-hall on a Friday.  When teased about his dietary refusal, Chayefsky reportedly adopted a thick Irish brogue and said that, since he was Catholic, he couldn’t eat meat on Fridays.  In any event, the name stuck with him throughout his life.

After the war, Chayefsky worked with his uncle in the printing business but moonlighted as a scriptwriter, first for radio and, then, television.  The early 1950's has been characterized as “the golden age of television” – or, now, as the “first golden age” since we are living in the second great creative efflorescence in this medium.  Chayefsky wrote innumerable scripts for Tv series as well as special one-night “playhouse” shows.  Despite his intense activity in this field, Chayefsky didn’t like TV and said that it was “stupid and doomed.”  His 1953 script for the Philco Playhouse production, “Marty” won him a number of awards.  (Rod Steiger played the title character on TV.)  In 1955, Marty was remade as a motion picture starring Ernest Borgnine.  Chayefsky won his first Oscar for that script.

In the late fifties, Chayefsky began writing for films.  He worked slowly in this medium which he seemed to regard as different from the quick, and economical, approach that he took to television scripts.  He won some acclaim for The Goddess (1957), a picture satirizing Marilyn Monroe’s rise to fame.   A black comedy and an ill-fated musical followed, The Americanization of Emily (with Julie Andrews and James Garner) and Paint Your Wagon.  Chayefsky’s script for The Hospital won him an Oscar in 1972.  He spent the next several years writing dozens of drafts of his most famous film screenplay, Network (1976) directed by his close friend, Sidney Lumet.  Chayefsky received his third Oscar for the screenplay to Network and accepted that award, together with the Best Actor award voted to Peter Finch, who had died, at the ceremony in 1977.  At that ceremony, Vanessa Redgrave made an anti-Zionist speech when she accepted her Oscar and Chayefsky derided her publicly when he took the podium.

Chayefsky had spent several years agonizing over a science fiction novel, Altered States.  That book was published in 1977 and Chayefsky wrote a controversial screenplay for Ken Russell’s film version of the movie made in 1980.

At 58, Chayefsky died in New York City as a result of cancer.  This was in 1981.  He is buried in Westchester County, New York under a tombstone marked with a Star of David.

Chayefsky famously said: “the American people are angry and want angry shows.”

A number of prominent entertainers trace their own art to Chayefsky.  Aaron Sorkin, the director of The Social Network, and famous for TV shows such as The West Wing has said that Chayefsky’s work, particularly Network, is a source to which he continuously returns.  Stephen Colbert has also said that Chayefsky’s influence is fundamental to his work.


The Hospital

At the time of its release, The Hospital was marketed as a profane, black comedy similar to Robert Altman’s MASH.  MASH, of course, was heavily improvised, mostly in a marijuana-induced haze.  The Hospital is a completely different kind of film, very closely tied to Chayefsky’s script which is profoundly literate in both good and bad ways.  In most respects, The Hospital should probably be regarded as kin to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove.

Arthur Hiller directed the film, largely on location at New York City’s massive Metropolitan Hospital Center.  Hiller was a pedestrian director but was punching above his weight class with this picture.  Hiller’s other credits are The Americanization of Emily (1964 – a collaboration with Chayefsky), Love Story (1970), The Out-of-Towners and Plaza Suite, two Neil Simon film adaptations made in the early seventies, and The In-laws (1976).  Hiller is an exact contemporary of Chayefsky, born in 1923 to Canadian Polish-Jewish immigrants.  He was the president of the Film Director’s Guild in the late 1980's.  Interestingly, Hiller cites as his chief influence the war films of Roberto Rosselini, particularly Paisan and Rome, Open City.


Diana Rigg and George C. Scott

For a generation of men now approaching dotage, Diana Rigg as Emma Peel enlivened many masturbatory fantasies.  In 1966, no one had ever seen anything like Emma Peel on the BBC show The Avengers.  A prototype for The X Files (although less dour and doomy-gloomy), The Avengers featured Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg solving macabre mysteries, rescuing one another from peril, and besting cartoonish bad guys in single combat – McNee’s John Steed, always an Edwardian gentlemen, speared villains with his bumbershoot whilst Mrs. Peel (as Steed always called her) kicked and karate chopped them into submission.  Emma Peel favored ultra-short mini-skirts, latex cat-suits, and leather sarongs equipped with strategically located zippers begging to be unzipped.  In how many adolescent day-dreams did this zippers gracefully descend to reveal the splendor and glories of Diana Rigg?
Dame Rigg was born in 1938, raised in India, speaking fluent Hindi.  Her peculiar, asymmetrical beauty was startling in the late sixties – she was a Bond girl to George Lazenby in 1969  – and she remains lovely today, still active in film and theater: she has recently been added to the cast of HBO’s Game of Thrones.  In her youth, Rigg embodied a certain cool, insouciant attitude toward sexuality that stood in start contrast to the otherwise febrile and orgiastic late sixties approach to this topic.  She was unashamed to appear nude.  You can see her in Peter Hall’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, playing the part of Helena and mostly naked for most of the show – a few strategically located leaves represents the entirely of her garment.  In 1971, the year that The Hospital was made, she appeared naked on Broadway prompting John Simon’s unchivalrous remark that she “looks like a brick basilica with its flying buttresses missing.”   Professionally trained in Shakespeare, Diana Rigg’s diction was marvelous and she has always been a sophisticated and talented actress.  She is famous for her Medea, her Lady Macbeth, Mother Courage in Brecht’s play and a host of other theatrical roles.  And she was the perfect tonic for George C. Scott’s suicidal Dr. Bock in The Hospital – she was 32 at that time to Scott’s 43.
George C. Scott, according to David Thomson, was the best actor of his generation, surpassing Marlon Brando (two years younger) in talent and ambition.  Scott was born in the Virginia in 1927.  After a stint in the Marine Corps, Scott worked on Broadway and began his film career in 1959 in The Hanging Tree.   The same year, he delivered a notable performance as the prosecuting attorney in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder and was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler.  For five or six years, he played menacing thugs and was frequently featured on television.  In 1964, he worked with Stanley Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove and was savagely funny as General Buck C. Turgidson, a role that he seems to have reprised a few years later when he impersonated Patton.  His breakthrough part as a leading man in a romantic role was in Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968), one of the best and most characteristic pictures of the late sixties – in that film, he also plays a doctor, the physician who comes to the rescue of the abused Julie Christie and, then, becomes her lover.  Scott became famous for playing General George Patton in 1969 in Franklin Schaffner’s picture of that same name.  Scott clashed with Schaffner and, in a fit of pique, boycotted the Academy Awards at which he was awarded a Best Actor Oscar.  (The next year he boycotted the Emmy’s where he was also slated to receive an acting award – he called awards of this kind “meaningless meat market parades.”  Scott appeared in many films, most notably They    
Might be Giants, also released in 1971.  He worked continuously in films, theater, and Tv up to his death in 1999.
Scott had a reputation for difficulty and was alcoholic.  (He attributed his drinking problems to his period of time in the Marine Corps attending upon servicemen’s funerals at Arlington National Cemetery.)  He had a well-publicized love affair with Ava Gardner when he was married to Collen Dewhurst.   Scott had a bad temper and tended to throw things and make threats on the set.  Once Maureen Stapleton approached director Mike Nichols during a stage production of a Neil Simon play, Plaza Suite.  She was having trouble working with Scott.  “I don’t know what to do,” Stapleton told Nichols.  “I’m scared of him.”  Nichols shrugged and said, “My dear, everyone is afraid of George C. Scott.”
Scott is buried in an unmarked grave in California.    


Treppenwitz

In German, there is an expression that aptly describes Chayefsky’s script for The Hospital: “Treppenwitz.”  Treppenwitz, literally “stairway-wit,” describes a sardonic, brilliant, and scathing remark that you wish that you had made.  Treppenwitz is the perfect come-back, the unanswerable denunciation, the ideal riposte, a belligerent and annihilating verbal response that you think of when you are walking away from an unpleasant confrontation, or, more likely, invent in the car or subway on your way home.  Chayefsky gives Dr. Bock supernatural eloquence – he always makes furious tirades that are exactly, and unrealistically, pitch-perfect.  Bock says what Chayefsky wishes he could say.  He provides the ideal response to the chaos that he observes.  This characteristic of Chayefsky’s screenplay is both its strength and weakness.  The Hospital is staged as a narrative with commentary.  The interpretative commentary emerges from mouth of George C. Scott and must be regarded as authoritative.  This structure, however, reduces Bock to the status of a mere bystander and, essentially, reduces his agency.  The degree to which Bock’s ideal observer status limits his agency is described with the word “impotence”.  Bock is “impotent” because he is relegated to the status of a commentator.  (Later, Chayefsky would dramatize the fury of the impotent commentator in literal terms – that is, as the anger of the doomed newscaster-- by definition, one who merely reports and comments on the news -- in his film Network.)

Dr. Bock is a surrogate for Chayefsky.  This is apparent in the flippant rhetorical question that Bock poses to the head nurse: “Where were your nurses trained?  At Dachau?”  Chayefsky represents the generation of young American men who went to war against an evil enemy and returned home as victors.  In post-war America, these men built the liberal consensus which ruled this nation until the rise of Ronald Reagan.  The liberal consensus constructed by men like Paddy Chayefsky defined itself as being the opposite of Nazi, and Communist, totalitarian regimes.  In three respects, The Hospital depicts the crumbling of the liberal agenda that began in the late sixties.  First, a liberal regime does not destroy its enemies; rather, it finds ways to accommodate and integrate those opponents.  The victors of World War Two, paradoxically, built a world in which “victory” (“Sieg”) was impossible.  In liberal politics, you don’t defeat your adversaries so much as you find ways to compromise with them.  But, this willingness to compromise and yield is self-contradictory and bears within itself the seeds of its destruction.  By 1968, many liberal intellectuals felt pressure to placate radical elements to their Left – for example, Leonard Bernstein invited Black Panthers revolutionaries to his soirees and as increasingly radical political programs were advanced, liberal thinkers felt compelled to engage in a policy of “appeasement”.  Bock’s “Maoist” son is a symbol for the self-contradictory elements in the liberal imagination.  The “Maoism” of Bock’s rebellious and derisive son also points to another feature of the liberal consensus that was much under attack in the 1971.  Stalinist and Nazi polities regiment the youth.  Young people must be indoctrinated in the ideology of the State.  A liberal education, however, rejects overt ideological indoctrination, and, thereby, runs the risk that young people will, in fact, reject the very principles of tolerance and freedom that underlies their society.  Finally, a liberal society focuses on the well-being of the individual.  But, without proper discipline, the pursuit of pleasure may become an anarchic narcissism.

As The Hospital progresses, it becomes apparent that the film is wildly ambitious and that Chayefsky’s critique is not limited to health care – although his depiction of a failing medical system is prescient and disturbingly relevant today.  Rather, Chayefsky’s script enlarges the domain of malaise beyond the hospital itself.  Dr. Bock is suicidal because he stands for a generation of men victorious over a system that built concentration camps, but faced with the realization that, if anything is constant and integral to human society, it is the concentration camp, and not the liberal democracy that opposes such camps.  The hospital and the concentration camp stand as the two opposing elements in Chayefsky’s imagination.  The first represents the benign aspirations of liberalism.  The camp is an emblem for  human indifference and cruelty.  Chayefsky’s rage arises from the fact that these two archetypal institutions threaten to become indistinguishable.  

The Hospital is a “schizoid machine” that mirrors the self-contradictions in liberalism.  Chayefsky was famous for his naturalism, his realistic “kitchen-sink” depiction of lower middle-class urban life.  His first Oscar was for Marty, a film that epitomized a new kind of realism in fifties’ film-making.  This kind of realism, however, is temperamentally opposed to the kind of ferocious theatrical eloquence with which Chayefsky feels compelled to demonstrate his fury at the collapse of the liberal consensus.  Accordingly, The Hospital contains documentary-style realism uneasily wedded to Shakespearian furor.  This is most evident in the big scene between the drunken Dr. Bock and Diana Rigg’s hippie chick.  Even in the tolerant early Seventies, it seems unrealistic that a major hospital would tolerate its Chief of Staff openly drinking himself into oblivion on the premises and, then, inflicting something that looks like a rape on the willing young woman within the hospital itself.  This is an example of a scene fractured along the fault-line between Chayefsky’s naturalistic, documentary-style milieu and his quasi-Shakespearian ambition to give vent to the anger of a whole generation of men whose victory is hollow in a world in which the very notion of “victory” is non-existent.

Manny Farber on Chayefsky

Not surprisingly, Farber disliked “Paddy” Chayefsky’s work and, indeed, wrote two detailed essays denouncing him as well as other directors that the critic felt embodied the new “hard-sell businessman-artist.”  Farber felt that Chayefsky expressed his ideas through too much intrusive dialogue and that his films were forums for showy acting that was both unnatural and distracting.

In 1957, Farber wrote an essay called “Hard-Sell Cinema”.  The burden of the essay is an attack on artists that Farber felt were glib, commercial and soulless.  As a writer, Chayefsky is in good company – Farber also vehemently attacks Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, and John Cheever.  The essay establishes an opposition between old-school Hollywood directors like Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and Raoul Walsh (good guys) and Elia Kazan, Delbert Mann, and Chayefsky (bad guys).  Farber sees this ascendency of the “businessman-artist” in all media – he also denounces Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz while praising Charlie Parker as an authentic jazz musician.  (Farber’s diatribe also is lodged against the painter, Larry Rivers.)  The businessman-artist in Hollywood is a refugee from Broadway who has reached Los Angeles through TV in the “early fifties.”  Film makers like Chayefsky exercise “pointed control” with “strict exploitation of beadlike detail.”  Their films use “supposedly daring material” in a “voyeur-like” way.  These “exiles from Broadway” espouse a “mean-spirited liberalism” that is condescending toward their subjects.  The “spectator” is supposed “to suspect that he is in the presence of a disturbing original talent” but, in fact, the work is simply a tarted-up “copy” of previously existing forms.  The mode of these films is non-narrative – the pictures feature two people caught “between the events of life” (for instance, walking from a cloak room to a table in The Sweet Smell of Success) – engaged in dialogue that contains “savage emotionalizing.”

Farber  renewed this complaint against Chayefsky in 1959 in an essay called “Hollywood’s Plot Against Plot.”  In this text, Farber decries Chayefsky’s “scorn of Hollywood’s old story-through-action technique.”  He argued that Chayefsky’s scripts were uncinematic because they relied too heavily on intensely dramatized dialogue to establish their points.  Chayefsky’s essential tactic, Farber said, was that of “extended one-note misery of an amateur drinker having a hangover.”

We don’t know what Farber thought of The Hospital.  We do know that a very good critic, David Thomson, thinks that The Hospital is an outstanding film and one that contains George C. Scott’s most powerful film performance.

Of course, Farber’s criticisms are unfair.  But they are worth considering as an eccentric perspective on Chayefsky’s work.