The Hospital is a 1971 American absurdist satirical black comedy film directed by Arthur Hiller[2] and starring George C. Scott as Dr. Herbert Bock.

In 1995, The Hospital was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Dr. Bock admits to impotence and has thoughts of suicide, but falls in love with Barbara Drummond, a patient's daughter who came with her father from Mexico for his treatment.

"[7] The New York Times found the film “a very serious (in fact, perhaps, a little too serious), very funny melodramatic farce ... [it] is not, as you might be led to believe, the sort of pious, inside-institution literature that Arthur Hailey grinds out to satisfy the book clubs, if not the muses, nor is it really one of those malpractice horror stores that are so helpful in obtaining lecture tours for medical men ... the writer’s intelligence, and his only recently exercised gift for fantasy ... save ‘The Hospital’ from a couple of serious seizures that, toward the end, overtake the movie when it feels called upon to certify its serious purposes and to straighten out its peculiar plot ... Mr. Hiller ... obtains excellent performances from his stars [and] has perfectly cast the film down to roles that are so small they depend—I suspect—as much on natural mannerism as on acting talent.”[8] More recently, film critic Dennis Schwartz gave the film a mildly positive review, writing, "The gallows humor was the melodramatic farce's saving grace; the film uses its razor-sharp instruments to cut into the hides of the insensitive institutionalized health care providers like Michael Moore's Sicko does in 2007 to the fat-cat HMOs.

My major gripe was that it could have been better, as Chayefsky delivered his part of the bargain and so did Scott; nevertheless the pic flattens out as the director increasingly loses his way in all the bitterness and invented horror stories and leaves us dangling over how to get out of such an irredeemable world (where modern man is perceived as forgotten in death).