Emergency Hospital

Emergency Hospital (1956)

This is meant to be a true-to-life glimpse of a modern (at the time) emergency ward with all the personal and medical dramas you'd expect. You can only appreciate it in context. It probably pushed boundaries in talking about adultery, drug abuse, suicide, child beatings, and so on, and it did it with the very reasonable cover of the setting, where things like this happen. The Hays Code could not quite interfere.

It's not brilliant stuff. I repeat not.

But there is some unusually naturalistic acting, especially (of all people) the woman who keeps answering the telephone. There is a woman doctor who leads the way for both intelligence and compassion, and another (male) doctor who supports her. And there is an odd and central character in a loitering detective from the police, who is kindly (he never really arrests anyone, just scolds them) and gets involved very personally in each case. Weird but interesting. Even weirder is the actor's name--Walter Reed--which some of you will recognize as a major military hospital in the U.S.

It's hard to know what the goal of the movie was besides the direct drama of it all. But there are tons of little and often weird asides. There is the father who wants to prosecute his son for breaking into the family store, and then the father who won't prosecute the rapist who attacked his daughter, preferring to send her away so no one will find out. Are fathers so bad as that in the 1950s? This movie thinks so, and in both cases the amazing humanity of the staff (doctors, nurses, and receptionist) turns the fathers heads and makes them do the right thing. It's painfully forced but it has its message anyway.

Of course, the drama gets over the top (this is not cinema-verite, after all) and is a bit too much. And as much as I really like the leading doctor played by Margaret Lindsay, who has a career going back to the 1930s, the story is just too wooden and forced. In a way, at the end, I was touched by it all, but as a movie, I hate to say, look elsewhere.

This depiction of a "typical" night at the Emergency Hospital is directed in a low key, low budget fashion reminiscent of Dragnet, and other "real life" dramas of the time. As such, it makes an interesting time capsule into 50s preoccupations (juvenile delinquency, car racing playboys, women doctors who choose career over love, police sergeants who work too hard and neglect their families) and the shots of nighttime Los Angeles, with streetcar tracks and Rexall drug stores, are great. The low budget really gets in the way (this appears to be a hospital with only three rooms and two doctors), however, once the action moves indoors.

Serviceable performances and OK direction make this feel much like what ER would have been like, had it been made on a shoestring budget in the 50s. There are multiple plot lines, and the personal lines of the characters becomes important in how the hospital cases develop. The movie is interesting for historical reasons, and the amount of corniness is not too excessive for the period. Feminists may despair about the ending, however.

Emergency Hospital (1956)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A Detective Story rip off from Bel Air Productions. The film shows a short period inside an emergency room where doctors have to deal with all sorts of weirdos. I mentioned Bel Air Productions because, according to the IMDb, they made a total of thirty-two movies and this is the forth one I've seen. This film, The Black Sleep, Voodoo Island and Pharaoh's Curse all take interesting set ups and then crash them into the ground for a hardcore death. All four are overly talky and go no where, which is a shame because with a better production some of them could have been good. This film only runs 62-minutes but it runs out of gas early on, although there are some camp moments that might keep some interested. There's all sorts of horrible acting that makes the casts of Ed Wood movies seem Oscar worthy.

It's one night in the Emergency Hospital in a big city. Non of the actors stand out. Quite frankly, the most memorable character is the telephone operator taking in all the calls. She has the best one-sided exchanges of anybody. The female lead doctor does have a compelling story with a Mercedes. The various stories can be reminiscent of a modern medical TV show. This is essentially a striped down episode of an ER episode. It's weird to have prison bar cells in the hospital. It's also shocking to see a 50's movie deal with these issues so bluntly. With better actors and sharper dialogue, this could be an intense TV show recognizable by any modern audience.

Lee Sholem gives maybe here one of his best film. It is not a western, adventure, horror nor crime flick, as we could have expected from this supposed lousy and lazy director - check his filmography - so we are surprised by this film which could be seen as a pilot for a TV series dedicated to hospital crews, staff; Which will be the case several years later, but maybe not because of this Bel Air production. Not the bottom of the barrell of poverty row Hollywood productions. It is not a crime, nor really a drama, only some kind of a chronic, without being a comedy either. So there is real plot, not even a music score, it could speak of cops in a police station, or firemen in a fire station.