One of my all time favorites.

Fantastic!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The movie has its flaws but script by Chayefsky elevates this to a great commentary on the modern organisation.

Herbert Bock (George C. Scott) is chief of medicine in a Manhattan teaching hospital. His wife has left him. His son is a malcontent communist and his daughter is a delinquent drug dealer. His hospital is a chaotic mess. The latest being the death of Dr. Schaefer. After killing a patient with negligence, he finds a use with the empty bed and a nurse. The next morning, he is dead stuck with an IV. It seems to be a series of bad errors. The hospital is also facing a protest from the apartment residents next door who are about to lose their home to the hospital. There seems to be a killer on the loose in the hospital. Bock finds some relief from his suicidal thoughts when he falls for a patient's daughter Barbara Drummond (Diana Rigg).The Paddy Chayefsky script is sharp rapid-fire medical jargon and a biting skewering of modern medicine. The dysfunction is funny. The tone does keep changing with the serial killer storyline. This reminds me of other hospital TV dramas like St. Elsewhere. George C. Scott delivers some powerful work. The scattering of characters can be confusing which fits very nicely with the confusing nature of the hospital.

George C. Scott delivers a searing performance as Dr. Herbert Brock, Chief of Medicine at an unnamed urban hospital who is beset by a series of mysterious deaths(both doctors and patients) that he at first attributes to incompetence(there is some) but later finds that they are a deliberate act committed by a madman...In the meantime, he must deal with his own problems as he struggles with a divorce, grown children who wont speak to him, and his impotence. His life changes when he meets a beautiful woman(Diana Rigg) who wants his permission to release her comatose father into her care. Brock pours his heart out and vents his rage with her, causing them to fall in love(!) though her father isn't as comatose as they think...Brilliant comedy is one of the finest ever made, being uproariously funny on the one hand, yet profoundly bleak on the other. Superbly written(Paddy Chayefsky) and directed(Arthur Hiller) film has many profound things to say about medicine and humanity, and will stay with you long after the film is over. A classic.

Paddy Chayefsky's Oscar-winning original screenplay about a brilliant but melancholy doctor who heads up an under-staffed, over-crowded New York City hospital churning with misdiagnoses, malpractice lawsuits...and now, an apparent serial-killer who targets doctors and nurses. Chayefsky's tirades (made up of both coherent and incoherent anger and outage) are, occasionally, thick with a writer's pretensions; however, his protagonist (portrayed by a convincingly weary and raspy-voiced George C. Scott) is a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood man the audience can easily identify with. Scott (and a rather amusingly miscast Diana Rigg as a missionary's daughter) head up a terrific cast of East Coast-based character actors, and Chayefsky and director Arthur Hiller keep them all walking and talking like madly-literate eccentrics. The picture doesn't look particularly good--and the sound is often crude--but with such biting humor and scathing targets, "The Hospital" succeeds greatly at being a pitch-black comedy of modern ills. **1/2 from ****