Britannia Hospital (1982)

 

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Screenplay: David Sherwin

Cast: Leonard Rossiter as Vincent Potter; Graham Crowden as Professor Millar; Jill Bennett as Dr. MacMillan; Joan Plowright as Phyllis Grimshaw; Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis; Mark Hamill as Red

Ephemeral Waves

 

You wouldn’t know Karl Marx from a toffee apple!

Lindsay Anderson’s success, after his short documentary work from the fifties and This Sporting Life (1963), would reach an unofficial trilogy of loosely tied films, starting with If… (1968), the breakout success at the right time and place in history, in the late sixties during a politically tumultuous time, a tale of the final violent breakdown between roles at a boys' boarding school that would win acclaim and the Palme d'Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. It continued with O Lucky Man! (1973), apt for the strange and freewheeling seventies, three hours long, and an indulgent production varying between weird animal person experiments, an idiosyncratic Pilgrim’s Progress-like take about then-Britain, and one unfortunate aspect of English actor Arthur Lowe in black face among the multiple characters he plays. Britannia Hospital, set within a day at the titular hospital when the Royal Highness is meant to visit, is the film to end the trilogy and appeared at the wrong time be to appreciated, brought out knee deep into the Margaret Thatcher era of British politics where this bleak satire on the state of the union would have violently contrasted her push as Prime Minister for Conservative capitalism.  

It is, with the opening an old man left dying in the middle of a hospital, an unfortunate reminder that the National Health Service, and the issues of health care and how it runs, has been with us for decades. Britannia Hospital is an ensemble tale where this tour of the Queen is going to collapse as the kitchen staff is on strike, there are protests about the African dictator in the private ward, and one of your staff is building a Frankenstein body even if it means ending someone’s life support for the perfect head. Malcolm McDowell is Mick Travis, following this tentative trilogy built around the actor, secretly entering the hospital as a window cleaner to get a secret scoop (with a duo including Mark Hamill in the truck outside to record everything, if they are not getting stoned watching documentaries about battery chicken farms). Lindsay Anderson’s film is the bleakest of black comedies, a snapshot of how he views Britain and humanity through many sides. Aggravated workers on strike, blocking ambulances; Professor Millar (Graham Crowden) with his built man and his Genesis Project; the overwhelmed staff in non-medical levels having to be bribed with hot breakfasts to clear the entrance for a huge emergency; and just a general sense of nothing working, as this hospital is merely a metaphor for Britain in general from a very jaded perspective. Even the union protests can be as bad in their choices of racist language and how they can be bribed with OBEs, even when they find their courage to follow their beliefs afterwards. Even the private patients, the example of the corruption of the hospital, and in the middle of a class and privilege war, feel they are paying too much for their treatment even if they get exclusive luxury lunches and their own private rooms, so no one is really winning from this system.

What this becomes is a work not trying for answers, and is a bleak work at its heart. There is absurdity however to undercut this, coming in touches. The consultants for the Royalty, for example, have a male actor playing a woman without a deliberate joke on this, and the Lord with her significantly shorter by her waist for contrast. Alongside a murderer's row of recognizable British actors of television and cinema from this era, they also have characters even as archetypes they can embellish. Graham Crowden's Miller is a show stealer by himself, a megalomaniacal egotist who wants to be God and literally blends a brain into a drinkable smoothie at one point, who yet gets the sanest rant of how damned humanity is in the ending, even allowing Anderson to bury Hollywood when one of the lines in that final speech is how the money put on one film could have fed an entire third world tribe for a long time. Leonard Rossiter, who would be famous for the likes of the BBC sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-1979), plays Potter, another show stealer as the man who really runs Britannia Hospital, its negotiator who actually makes sure the place is still working even if it means bribing people with the promise of the aforementioned OBEs, even brain staff to death with a shovel. Whether it is from the series Dad's Army (Arthur Lowe in one of his last appearances in a memorable one off scene) to British theatre with Joan Plowright, vast swathe of British culture comes together in this film, like so many even into the modern day, and like the best of these, you have character actors who can stand out and add so much particularly to a work like this, so barbed yet fully one scathing one-liners, they make stand out. Even Mark Hamill, the least expected person to be here, works in his scenes perfectly.

The film is difficult, arguably too nihilistic and too scattershot to work for some, but the problem is one accepting that in real life, as not much has changed in Britain decades later, too many problems let alone with the NHS are to be spun like plates and are always a threat, especially as this film's subjects are not just health care but universal, such as the treatment of manual labor staff and class biases. There are moments though which succinctly get a point across, such as the Rudyard Kipling ward, an advanced ward where one nurse looks after more than seven people. Even before you glance side eye at the tech bros nowadays obsessed with cutting out human beings, with computer run hospital wards something one would try, and cut the nurse out of it entirely, there is also the very British joke that this advanced ward is closed due to the lack of cleaning staff, wasting all that money on something not likely to have worked and also named after a contentious author of the British colonial era.

It is a compelling film, one where the mad scientist, despite being one who builds a human being (and results in a very gory finale as a sub plot), turns out to be the sanest one. Even when lamenting humanity's lost potential and presenting a future of a brain in a jar as the superior evolution, his final words are not funny but tragic. Sadly for Lindsay Anderson, whose career was already small in terms of the amount of theatrical films he actually helmed, this would be one of his last films. There is a documentary covering the music group WHAM! touring China from 1986, and television work, but the last theatrical film before his 1994 passing was The Whales of August (1987), a drama which in tone feels of a very different type of film from the three politically charged works (and This Sporting Life), followed by Glory! Glory! (1989), a TV movie about televangelists and his last before his death. Britannia Hospital is absolutely a cult film in its form and existence; where as If... came in 1968, where a sudden political earthquake happened which it befit the time, O Lucky Man and this for the other two films in this unofficial trilogy are strange satires, of their times in their casts and even getting made as they turned out, but alien even to their time periods. They are unique and to approach Britannia Hospital, one needs to be willing to laugh even at the absurdity of life to be able to appreciate its caustic nature.