D.O.A.

THE HOSPITAL

Directed by ARTHUR HILLER

Screenplay by PADDY CHAYEFSKY

SUCH GOOD FRIENDS

Directed by OTTO PREMINGER

Screenplay by ESTHER DALE

Doctors are butchers. Hospitals are abattoirs. Patients are lucky to get away with their lives, never mind their good health. These are more or less the notions behind these two films, both of which purport to be comedies. The medical profession is eminently ripe for a good dissection, but the satire is laid on here with all the clumsiness of an intern at his first operation.

The Hospital shares little but garrulousness with the kind of Bronx homespun that made Screenwriter Chayefsky's reputation (Marty, The Bachelor Party). It has more in common with the dyspeptic humor of Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily, a clubfooted send-up of war heroes. It even has the same director, Arthur Hiller, who last holiday season took the medical profession rather more seriously in Love Story.

When the situations are easy, the laughs are there, all right: patients expiring in the emergency room while a hospital official tries to determine their Blue Cross number, some nut wandering the hospital corridors knocking off staff and patients.

It is when things wax serious, as they often do, that Chayefsky and Hiller choke on their own message: moral responsibility is needed not only to guide lives but to save them as well. Anyway, George C. Scott is on hand to make things bearable, and sometimes more than that. He is such a consummate actor that he can even handle Chayefsky's dialogue, which rightfully should be engraved for posterity on a plaque made of chicken fat.

Such Good Friends has something to do with the racy Lois Gould bestseller about a woman (Dyan Cannon) whose husband (Laurence Luckinbill) enters the hospital for a routine operation and rapidly develops severe complications. Hunting around in the desk drawer for the medical insurance, the wife discovers a little black book in which Hubby has recorded his numerous infidelities.

She confronts his paramours, who happen to be some of her best friends. She then determines to be wild and wanton enough with Hubby's friends to match his score. He meanwhile is being ministered to by a battalion of quacks and incompetents, and is fading faster with every hour.

The whole notion is so outrageously melodramatic that Preminger was probably right in choosing to play it for comedy. He even got Elaine May to rewrite the script. Miss May, however, shrewdly chose not to have her name appear on the screen credits. The large and generally unsubtle cast includes James Coco, who acts with grotesque abandon, Ken Howard, Jennifer O'Neill and Nina Foch.

On second thought, Such Good Friends might have worked better the other way. Preminger is usually funnier --remember Hurry Sundown?--when he's trying to be serious.

qedJ.C.

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