The House of God

I saw The House of God on TV in the 90s, a late night slot. I finally discovered the name of the film I saw those years ago.

All I remember is the outrageously dark humor, encapsulated by the scene of Charles Haid (aka The Fatman) raising a hospital bed of an elderly immobile patient higher and higher off the floor, while explaining to his impressionable interns that the only way an elderly GOMER will die is though accident not illness. My next realization was my lowering oxygen levels, as I was laughing so hard.

It's a great petty it's not on DVD, hardly every shown on TV and the only remaining copies of this near mythical film are old treasured VHS copies passed between medical interns.

By the way, I just checked a long list of films that were shown by Moviedrome, a BBC2 series presented by Alex Cox that aired rare cult movies. The Hose of God was not on the list, weird.

...which I discovered immediately after finishing my own internship. As a reflection of what the medical training experience was like in the '70s (before the concept of diagnosis-related groups - DRGs - changed the way in which we hospitalize patients, particularly GOMER'd Medicare clients), the novel was the absolute truth, up to and including the rutting behavior of 'terns and residents trying to compensate for too much stress by going after too much sex.

Remember, it was not only pre-DRG (which first began testing in New Jersey in 1980 before going nationwide in 1983) but also pre-AIDS (which first began to manifest with epidemiological significance in 1981). By 1984, however - when this movie is considered to have been released, even though it had been finished in 1979 - its subject matter (and the novel's approach to it) simply wasn't topical any longer.

With the DRG system rammed down their collective throat by HCFA, hospitals no longer got revenue by performing all sorts of procedures and hanging onto patients for weeks on end (charging by the day). Instead, they began to be paid a set amount by third-party "health insurance" carriers according to the diagnosis-related group into which the particular patient fell. Explanations of DRG are available all over the 'Net, and I suppose Wikipedia's entry is good enough for most folks' purposes.

The whole thrust of the DRG system can be summed up as discharging each patient "quicker and sicker." A nasty situation for the admitting physician, who has to balance his/her best appreciation of the patient's needs against the hospital administration's pestering to do as little as possible as rapidly as possible to get the patient stable enough to wheel the critter out the door.

As for the matter of sexual promiscuity.... Well, that all went bye-bye when we discovered a sexually transmitted disease that transcended the status of "treatable inconvenience" to become a death sentence. If there's substance to *The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS* premise so beloved of the conservatives, have you ever wondered why the hell all us heterosexual doctors (most of us classifiable as "Hard Right" political conservatives even as college students) have practically welded our zippers shut over the past twenty years and more?

None of this, however, fully explains the failure to make the movie commercially available except on cable TV. There are certainly enough potential purchasers worldwide who are interested in the novel and would like to own a copy of the movie adaptation on home video, no matter how badly produced it might have been. So why is this film so spectacularly unavailable?

My cousin is a neurologist, and I roomed with him and one of his friends when I first heard of the book House of God. I also heard that it had been made into a movie which had never been released. Apparently it was run on cable television a couple of times, and copies circulated among doctors, nurses and interns. I met more doctors as a result of them coming over to our apartment to see this movie.

I haven't seen it in years, but I remember that I was very impressed with the adaptation. It is an 'inside' movie, in that those who are not doctors will not get as much out of it as those who are part of the profession, one reason perhaps why the film was not released. It was also pretty loose as far as plot and story, but so was the book. Lord knows there are a lot of movies that are far worse that did make it to theaters. The collapse of UA at the time was icing on the cake.

I distinctly remember my cousin telling me that the scenes in the ER were the most realistic he'd seen. Of course thanks to TV such scenes in the ER are a lot more plentiful.

Certainly worth seeing, and worth releasing on DVD.

United Artists never theatrically released this movie, often claimed because of the hectic going-ons at UA during the time of its completion (the studio was still recovering from HEAVEN'S GATE, the studio had been sold to MGM, and there was new management.) Looking at the completed movie itself, I think UA saw it being simply uncommercial, especially seeing how they also shelved it for several years. I've never read the book, but the movie is a mess. There's no real plot to speak of, the characters are barely sketched out, and things seemingly happen at random. In fact, a lot of scenes have a strong feeling of improvisation. The biggest sin the film makes is that the supposedly humorous moments simply aren't funny - and as you probably know, there's nothing worse than a comedy that isn't funny. Even the talented (and yet-to-be famous) cast can't do anything with the lame material.

The House of God is based on the actual experiences of Samuel Shem when he was a medical intern at Harvard's Beth Israel (as in 'House of Israel') Hospital in Boston in the mid-70s. Shem is a nom de plume (the word Shem is Hebrew for 'name'). In medical school I spent some time at the BI and got to know the doctor who inspired the Leggo. His description in the book is accurate except for the giant purple birthmark on his face which didn't exist in real life. I later trained at a different Harvard hospital in the early 90s and one of the internists there trained a year after "Shem" and corroborated many of the details. One rumor I heard about why the film wasn't released was that Harvard Med School threatened legal action. Don't know if this is true since all the names of people and institutions were fictional in the book and movie but who knows?