Satirical black humour from Anderson at his cutting best.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29468 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-07-19
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 112 minutes

DVD Description
Director Lindsay Anderson and screenwriter David Sherwin continue their story of Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), who played the rebellious schoolboy in the 1969 film If. and the go-getter coffee salesman in the 1973 film O Lucky Man! In Britannia Hospital, Mick Travis is now an undercover investigative TV reporter in another allegorical story of the decline of the West. Set in a large, 500-year-old public hospital, Britannia Hospital is a dark, scattershot, Swiftian satire of the class conflicts in pre-Thatcher England. The hospital, staffed by megalomaniacal doctors, is in a state of near anarchy as its administration prepares for a visit from The Queen. Striking workers only allow "croakers"--patients near death--into the hospital, the kitchen staff refuses to prepare food until union leaders are bought off with promises of OBEs, and the head surgeon (Graham Crowden) conducts, with public funds, deranged experiments, while poor patients are deprived of basic services. On the day of the Royal visit, busloads of protesters arrive, and after battling with riot police, attempt to prevent the royal ceremony.

Working in a less apocalyptic and surreal style than that of O Lucky Man!, but still more fantastic than the American comedy The Hospital, Anderson and Sherwin try to anchor this extremely black comedy to a somewhat realistic setting while still aiming at nothing less than a comic indictment of all the ills of Western culture.

Synopsis
This is the third and final film in Lindsay Anderson’s powerful satirical trilogy dissecting modern Britain. The trilogy follows Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) from his boarding school days in If… through his transition from salesman to film star in O Lucky Man! to his present vocation as investigative reporter, on assignment at Britannia Hospital. The cynical reporter Travis lands himself at Britannia where Vincent Potter (Leonard Rossiter), administrator of the Britannia, is desperately trying to restore order in time for a visit by the Queen Mother, despite staff disputes and cost cuts. But even nastier, surreal disturbances are waiting to be unearthed by Travis in the bowels of the hospital...

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Customer Reviews

Unappreciated at the time, an absolute masterpiece
It's hard to believe in this age of successful dark comedy, from 'The Office' and 'Extras' to 'Brasseye' and 'The League of Gentlemen', how shocking this film was to reviewers at the time, simply by being pitch-black in its humour. Even recently, I heard some berk of a film critic say that it wasn't a patch on its predecessors, 'If...' and 'O Lucky Man'. Nonsense! It is easily the equal of 'If...' and rather superior to 'O Lucky Man', which, in my view, is way too long and rather uneven. Director Lindsay Anderson was understandably upset by Britannia Hospital's critical mauling, but its targets, from pompous royalists to selfish union leaders, from power-crazed professors to lazy, rule-bound porters are expertly brought down. Cynical coke-fuelled journalists, hospital administrators who would kill to look good (literally, at one point), policemen who can't control a situation without resorting to violence, vacuous wise-cracking DJs even a bemused Queen Mother who hasn't a clue what's going on...they're all there and rightly so. It was definitely a film ahead of its time. Interestingly, the production team apparently didn't research much what real hospital life was like before making it, but everyone I have met who has ever worked in a hospital finds it instantly and painfully recognisable!

The third film in the Mick Travis Trilogy
If you liked If... and O Lucky Man, try hard to get hold of this film. Made in 1982, it is the long awaited follow up to O Lucky Man from 1973.

Not only is it directed by Lindsay Anderson, but it stars Malcolm McDowell and the rest of the cast from If... (including Biles) and the soundtrack is written by Alan Price of O Lucky Man fame.

The film is about pre-Thatcher England. Set amidst class war and union strikes, the film digs at everything from the NHS to the Royal Family.

A flop at the time due to it coming out during the Falklands War and the rise of patriotism, the film looks much better now and is very popular in the US.

Thank God for Lindsay Anderson!
British cinema is all too short of visionaries. Hidebound by an over-literary word-heavy theatrical tradition and the Heritage Industry, our films tend to be realistic, small-scale and faintly cosy. After Michael Powell, there is only Derek Jarman - and Anderson.

The third film of the trilogy (after "If..." If.... [1968]and "O Lucky Man" (O Lucky Man! [1973]) is equally apocalyptic, equally surreal, and equally individual. The two strands of the plot involve on the one hand a strike-bound hospital desperately trying to prepare for a royal visit, and on the other a crazed surgeon trying, Dr Frankenstein-like, to create a man from scratch. On the television screens there are bombings, battery chickens and wars which stoned technicians giggle at; outside the gates there are Human Rights demonstrators protesting at the presence of a genocidal African dictator in the Private Wing. The influences of Bunuel, Vigo and Brecht are still strong.

Nothing escapes unscathed. Not the monarchy, represented by a dwarf and a transvestite as palace representatives; not hospital management, always wheeler-dealing in short-termism to keep up appearances and keep the show on the road; not the Union reps, opportunistic manipulators who will sell out their members for the chance to meet the Queen Mother; not the union members who allow themselves to be mislead and who can't think beyond the next tea-break; not the media who are incapable of reporting anything seriously; not the police who are alternately bumbling and brutal; not the church, reduced to empty forms of worship where the congregation's responses are provided by a series of cassettes; not the doctors who are technology junkies who have long since forgotten that the purpose of medicine is to heal people. "Britannia Hospital" is Swiftian in the force and range of its indignation and disgust.

This doesn't mean it is inaccurate. In the same way that "If..." was a genuine portrait of the public school system seen through Absurdist eyes, "Britannia Hospital" presents a Dadaist but real NHS.

When this movie came out in 1982/3, I thought the depiction of the Unions and the workers lent itself to a conventional right-wing view at the time when Margaret Thatcher was trying to destroy them and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action to maintain their members' rights. It was a case of "Don't kick a man - or woman - when they're down". Now I can see that Anderson is attacking them for not being left-wing enough, not having any vision, being hung up on trivia and materialism.

A French reviewer here says he didn't get the humour. This surprised me; the nation that produced Ionesco, Ubu Roi and Boris Vian should see where Anderson is coming from. It's true that there aren't many out-and-out gags; the humour is surreal, deadpan, cumulative.

The film's plot - pleasingly economical, with one proviso - is driven by two characters and two actors. There is Potter, the administrator, (Leonard Rossiter, riding a crest from "Reggie Perrin" and "Rising Damp") skipping from one crisis to the next, always trying to salvage something only to have it undermined by the next disaster, marshalling his dwindling resources with the briskness of a general. It's a powerhouse of a performance, brimming with restless energy and seething resentments, and it pushes the film along at a fine trot.

Then there is Professor Millar (Graham Crowden, still happily with us and still acting at the age of 86). Millar is clearly psychotic and clearly mad. Like Potter he is a monomaniac who will murder to achieve his goals. But his madness is visionary, and it is left to Crowden to deliver a ten-minute speech at the end of the movie which stills the demonstrators who burst into the lecture theatre, savages humanity's lust for blood ("since the end of the Second War, not a single day has passed when men have not been killing each other in one of the 230 wars around the globe" - I paraphrase slightly) and offering a chilling vision of the future ("In fifteen years time we will be able to contain the whole of human knowledge in a matchbox"). His performance, its power and authority, is extraordinary, and it's a crime that no-one saw fit to recognise it with an award. The solution, coming from a madman, is itself mad, but the analysis is spot on. Like all the best visionaries, Anderson's predictions for the future have come about 70% true.

Talking of performers, one of the incidental pleasures is spotting actors who later went on to great things, or dropped in, so to speak. Mark Hamill, fresh from "Star Wars", Robin Askwith, Anderson regular Arthur Lowe who gets all of five lines before he drops dead, Robbie Coltrane in the crowd of demonstrators, Liz Smith as an almost-anonymous tealady; Alan Bates as a corpse.

What stops me from giving this 5 stars is the problem of Malcolm McDowell. What is he doing in this film? Clearly his name is necessary to get finance, and this is meant to be a trilogy about "Mick Travis", but his character makes no sense. He is meant to be some kind of investigative reporter, but he seems to be making aimless home movies with his little camera. I can't believe that a crack investogator, which he is meant to be, would be so incompetent or have such inept backup. Even surrealism needs some logic. Worse, he slows the movie down with a lot of aimless hide-and-seek round the hospital.

The other thing which prevents me giving it five stars is the lack of subtitles in this cheapskate EMI re-release. And actually you might need them, because I'm sure Amderson would have cleaned up the sound and the lip-sync if the money hadn't run out. (Maybe he'd have rethought the role of Travis as well).

The film which this reminds me most of is not another Anderson film, but Derek Jarman's "Jubilee" Jubilee [1978], five years older but equally despairing, apocalyptic and ferocious. Despite its faults, the world of cinema would be very much poorer without "Britannia Hospital". See it, and see what British cinema lacks nowadays. But bring a strong stomach.