What Ails Us: The Hospital

Steyn Online ^ | 17 July 2021 | Rick McGinness

[Rummyfan]

Writer Paddy Chayefsky was near the end of a decade-long slump in his career when The Hospital was released in 1971. Comes the time, comes the man – America was in turmoil as the social and political tumult of the '60s looked to be metastasizing into something bleaker and perhaps permanent with the new decade. Chayefsky was a writer known for eloquent and ambitious takes on personal despair, and the zeitgeist allowed him to broaden his loquacious and angry monologues to include a broader panorama – a society having a nervous breakdown.

Sidney "Paddy" Chayefsky was the child of Russian Jews from the Bronx, a brawling, hyperarticulate bully who began his career in the golden age of live television, before moving to the theatre and the movies. He'd been ricocheting back and forth between the two after his first great success with Marty, a TV drama that won him his first Oscar when it was made into a film in 1955.

It had been nearly eight years since The Americanization of Emily, a satirical anti-war film and box office flop starring James Garner and Julie Andrews, and Chayefsky had been wandering between TV and the stage, with occasional, short and disastrous stints on screenplays like the 1969 adaptation of Paint Your Wagon, the film that made the unfortunate assumption that Clint Eastwood should sing.

[Rummyfan]

Sunday movie chat.....

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

“Paint Your Wagon, the film that made the unfortunate assumption that Clint Eastwood should sing.”

https://compote.slate.com/images/184136e3-b4bc-46f7-8f91-07d1c5d132a6.jpg?width=1280

[jocon307]

Thanks for posting, I’ll have to read this. I remember this movie, my mother LOVED it.

[Fido969]

Steyn is a great writer.

[Hawleyish]

Marty is a wonderful movie. Compare the dating scene from the 50s to nowadays and it is hard to believe this is the same country. Don’t get me started on the tattoos.