Five years before "Network," Paddy Chayevsky's screenplay for this equally savage satire (1971) on hospitals was directed by Arthur Hill with George C. Scott starring as Dr. Herbert Bock, the head of surgery at a major teaching hospital in Manhattan. His wife has left him and his children disowned him, and Bock is impotent and suicidal as patients (and even staff!) begin dying off in record numbers due to apparent negligence, errors, and misdiagnoses. Barbara Drummond (Rigg) has come to take her comatose father back to the Sioux reservation to die, and she and Bock reach out to each other for emotional succor as a shadowy figure stalks the patients and staff. The first part of the film seems part melodrama, part horror, but then it veers into black comic farce, though Scott's suicide attempt scene is genuinely wrenching. (Trivia buffs: Stockard Channing's first screen role is here, uncredited, as an ER nurse.)
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The review of this Movie prepared by David Loftus
