Movie Mahal

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I think it is George C Scott’s extended raging monologue on the broad metaphorical complexities of impotency where Arthur Hiller’s film seems to find its exact expressive pitch, carving out not only a generational angst but pointing to a broader sense of disillusionment with everyday civil institutions that would characterise much of the mid to late 1970s in America and beyond. Framed against the spectacle of political protest, a reminder of the counterculture, Hiller and Chayefsky’s dark satire on the wretchedness and failure of American society has arguably lost none of its power. Although this is set in the confines of a hospital in Manhattan, it could be anywhere and, in any institution, but given the precarious milieu of the hospital the dichotomy of life and death magnifies the corporatisation of death as something inherently functional, pathological, and horrifically normal.