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"A grim prognosis, to say the least." Not Wiseman's hospital or Chayefsky's, but a phosphorescent arena for Michael Crichton's recomposition of Rosemary's Baby. The heroine is a medical student at Boston Memorial, keen and driven and blessed with Geneviève Bujold's lithe alertness, often at loggerheads with the careerist inclination of her beau (Michael Douglas). She notices healthy patients emerging comatose from minor operations, "a hell of a puzzler" pointing to sinister Jefferson Institute. (A care facility fronting for organ-harvesting skullduggery, it boasts brutalist architecture, red carpets, and Elizabeth Ashley's starched portent.) The chief of surgery (Richard Widmark) urges the snoop to take the long view, "we'll make the hard decisions." The medicine of Seventies paranoia, prescribed for the systematic maladies of paternalism and greed. Intersections of the clinical and the visceral, where pathology residents joke like Hitchcock's murder buffs. (Typical chatter: "Remember how you used to get that yellow cadaver skin under your fingernails?") The amateur sleuth graduates from running into bureaucratic dead ends to climbing into ducts and hiding in lecture halls, an assassin dispatches potential witnesses with cold efficiency but grows rather queasy as the pursuit leads to a heap of refrigerated corpses. Treachery of anesthesia, "99 percent boredom and one percent scared-shitless panic." Donen's Charade and Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers are the pillars of Crichton's technique, a quick glimpse of caged dogs indicates a more abstruse study, namely Franju's Les Yeux sans Visage. The striking bizarrerie of suspended figures in the mauve chamber is complemented by the horrific blandness of computerized auctions, the capper is that feminine inquisitiveness can no longer be forced into slumber. "Doctors make the worst patients. They know too much." With Rip Torn, Lois Chiles, Hari Rhodes, Richard Doyle, Lance LeGault, Tom Selleck, Joanna Kerns, and Ed Harris.
--- Fernando F. Croce |