Emergency Hospital

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.

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.

Except for Margaret Lindsay playing an ER doc, and thus bravely assaulting the ramparts of mid 50s sexism, this movie is code blue. Give it a C.

Efficient little programmer that tackles some controversial subject matter for the 50s, attempted suicide, child abuse and rape. What may be even more surprising is that the dialogue contains both the words rape and pregnant something that the production code usually disallowed. This was probably due to the fact that this came from a poverty row studio and strictures weren't so tight. The low budget is evident in that the hospital only seems to have three rooms and two doctors! However again for the time period the hospital staff is rather diverse with both an Asian and an African-American nurse. No great shakes but an interesting artifact.