Plot
The film is set in a teaching hospital in Manhattan and centers around Dr. Bock (George C Scott), the Chief of Medicine, whose life is in disarray: his wife has left him, his children don't talk to him, and his once-beloved teaching hospital is falling apart.
The hospital suffers from the sudden deaths of two doctors and a nurse. These are attributed to coincidental or unavoidable failures to provide accurate treatment.
At the same time, administrators must deal with a protest against the hospital's annexation of an adjacent and decrepit apartment building. The annexation is to be used for a drug rehabilitation center; the building's current occupants demand that the hospital find them replacement housing before the building is demolished despite the building being condemned sometime before.
As Dr. Bock complains of impotence and has thoughts of suicide, he falls for Barbara Drummond (Diana Rigg), a patient's daughter who both came from Mexico for her father's treatment. This temporarily gives Dr. Bock something to live for after Barbara confronts him.
The deaths are discovered to have initiated by Barbara's father, as retribution for the "inhumanity" of modern medical treatment. Drummond's victims would have been saved if they'd received prompt, appropriate treatment -- but they didn't. Dr. Bock and Barbara use a final, accidental death of a doctor at the hospital to cover Drummond's tracks, while Barbara takes her father back to JFK airport to escape back to Mexico; leaving Dr. Bock at his insistence to try and organize the chaotic Hospital.
It was filmed at Metropolitan Hospital Center in New York.
Read more about this topic: The Hospital
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)