Director: Jerry Thorpe
Writer: William Blinn
From: Drive-In (only 5 remain!)
Watch: archive.org
A cardiologist finds his life changed due to his interactions with a patient.
A made-for-TV movie from the writer of Brian’s Song, adapter of Roots, and co-writer of Purple Rain. Purple Rain! Surely this will be good!
It’s whatever.
Louis Gossett Jr. plays Dr. St. Clair, a cardiologist whose marriage is on the rocks. He’s contacted by Joe Hamill, an adulterous reporter who’s just suffered a cardiac event. St. Clair becomes Hamill’s doctor and the two go back and forth antagonizing each other.
Hamill convinces his hospital roommate to consult with Dr. St. Clair about the upcoming triple-bypass that the roommate’s doctor, the hospital’s head doctor, Mendel, has recommended. When Mendel hears the request, he confronts St. Clair and gives him the patient’s records. All the records, though, support Mendel’s recommendation.
Oh, meanwhile St. Clair’s marriage has fixed itself and Hamill has asked his wife for a divorce so he can be with his mistress. You’d think these would be bigger plot points since the doctor and patient’s relationships are established early on as mirrors of each other, but they’re sorted with little-to-no-fuss if they’re not sorted off-screen.
The surgery date approaches, but something keeps bothering St. Clair about the video and x-rays he looked at. He overhears the patient tell Hamill that he’d been in a car accident as a child and had some ribs removed. St. Clair realizes the materials he looked at had all the ribs present. He confronts Mendel about the records being tampered with and the patient not needing the surgery. Mendel pushes back essentially with “so what,” arguing that the business end of running the hospital can’t be ignored. Without the money generated through surgeries and donations based on the successes of the hospital, they can’t do any good for any patients. The surgery, though, is called off.
Later, St. Clair finds Hamill running laps around a track. St. Clair says Mendel has resigned and St. Clair has been offered his job. St. Clair is willing to be head doctor, but he doesn’t want anything to do with the business end saying the multiple hats Mendel had to wear was part of the problem. He’s recommended Hamill for the administrative position, which Hamill accepts. They run together and start laughing. THE END
I wish the movie was better. It’s not actively bad, just kind of flat throughout. As I noted in the summary, the doctor is trying to save his marriage while the reporter is in the midst of trying to end his own. Gossett Jr. explicitly says this during the movie so you think it’s going to be the heart of the story, that this will be a drama about these two characters helping each other learn how to address their respective relationship challenges. And then it’s just not.
Instead it’s about the consequences of the hospital becoming increasingly depersonalized and focused on money. Only all that story happens in the background. To be fair, how would you go about dramatizing systemic bureaucratic creep? To complicate matters even further, Mendel isn’t really a villain. Sure, he seems monstrous when, in response to being accused of submitting his patient to a risky and unnecessary surgery, he says, “medicine is a business,” but the rest of his monologue is about the challenges of keeping the hospital afloat so that St. Clair and the other doctors can do the work of saving lives. In other words, he’s not wrong. In fact, he’s another victim of this system.
Granted, this movie is from 1978 so its insistence on medicine being a calling instead of a business is depressingly quaint. Forty years later the perspective is that there’s good money in saving lives because people will pay a lot to not die. So soak em for every dime you can. Also hilarious is the conceit at the end that Hamill, a reporter, will be making less money as a hospital administrator. Oh how things have changed.
In that respect, I guess the movie is a recommend since it seems to be ruminating on the beginning of the issues that we’re now living with. In other words, there’s an archaeological/sociological value to the piece. Dramatically though, it falls flat. There’s no energy and it’s never clear what the plot is supposed to be so, as a viewing experience, I’d have to suggest giving it a pass. It’s not bad, but it’s not anything really.
However, it is, somehow, in the public domain. Unfortunately my copy has Mill Creek graffiti all over it, but you can find a copy on archive.org here.
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