Rent Britannia Hospital (1982)

Britain on the Operating Table - Britannia Hospital review by griggs

It’s odd to watch a film where seemingly everyone pops up for a scene—Mark Hamill included, slotted neatly between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The cast list reads like a who’s who of early-’80s Britain, promising fireworks but delivering squibs.

The humour is the chief offender. Broad when it fancies itself sharp, laced with casual racism, it plays like a pretentious Carry On trying too hard to be clever. For satire, the laughs are thin, and as the last entry in Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis trilogy, it’s dispiriting to see Travis himself pushed to the margins.

And yet, the ambition is plain. The hospital is Britain in miniature—bureaucratic, hypocritical, perpetually malfunctioning. A fine conceit, but fumbled in execution, leaving the allegory sagging. Britannia Hospital sets out to diagnose the nation; instead, it loses the patient chart.

It's The Scientist's Round - Britannia Hospital review by CH

Artificial Intelligence. The brain is becoming burdened by the phrase. Little noticed, though, has been the third film, Britannia Hospital (1982) in the series by Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin about Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) up against the world.

This time, the camera turns to health, in particular a research hospital which is preparing for a Royal visit while staff are on strike and a mob gathers outside to protest about the private wing in which a dictator has fetched up with his retinue (there is a terrific scene with them and an orange in his ante-room).

And what a cast is gathered here. Anderson was able to draw upon his familiar faces, including Alan Bates who was content to be glimpsed as a corpse. Mona Washbourne, Arthur Lowe, Joan Plowright... they are all here. As is Graham Cowdon, familiar from O Lucky Man as a crazed scientist who experiments with animals. Out the back at the Hospital he has now progressed to humans, and his own sampling of”delicious” brain (made into what would later be called a smoothie) is but a starter.

Protestors and Royal alike find themselves in the audience for a lecture about the culmination of all this, a large, mechanical/electronic creature which recites an obvious enough speech from Hamlet - capped by Cowdon’s remark that, come the end of the century, all that will be contained within something the size of a matchbox.

As we know, a quarter of the way into the next next century, this Intelligence occupies even less space.

Could any machine manufacture a script to rival this one? True, it can sometimes feel as if several elements have been yoked together, even a touch of Carry On, but the same could be said of the previous two in the series. The mob - such a crowd of extras - is unleashed, and there is a controlled anarchy to the film itself.

Why is it not more widely known?