The picture is not quite a success, despite an excellent ensemble cast delivering memorable performances. Peter Nichols (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg) adapted his own material, but the resultant film is stagy and the bloodless hospital drama spoof doesn't come off.

A "Sony Screen Classics by Request" title on DVD-R format, The National Health (sometimes billed, but not onscreen, as The National Health...or Nurse Norton's Affair) is presented in 1.78:1 enhanced widescreen. Though a bit soft and grainy at times, this is a good presentation relative to DVDs of other British features from this period. No extras, not even a trailer.

Alcoholic Edward Loach (Colin Blakely) is admitted to the Princess Maria of Brattenberg Hospital after losing his memory. A bitter, combative personality, it takes him a while to warm up to his ward mates: Foster (Bob Hoskins, with a full head of hair in this early role), a working class-stiff; barely-closeted gay teacher Ash (Clive Sweet); deathly-ill senior Flegg (Bert Palmer); one-time physician Rees (Mervyn Johns); and terminally-ill cancer patient Rees (David Hutcheson) among them.

The patients are primarily cared for by mousy Nurse Sweet (Lynn Redgrave), Sister McFee (Eleanor Bron), roguish orderly Barnet (Jim Dale), and Nurse Powell (Shelia Scott-Wilkenson).

The movie cuts back and forth between the old, unappealing ward and its tired, disheartened or disinterested staff, and that on a television hospital melodrama. At the slick, ultra-modern Mount Verdant Hospital, Nurse Betty Martin (Lynn Redgrave), Sister Mary Macarthur (Eleanor Bron), Dr. Neil Boyd (Jim Dale), Nurse Cleo Norton (Shelia Scott-Wilkenson) and Chief Surgeon Boyd (Donald Sinden) are caught in a tangled web of romance and organ transplants.

The show-within-the-show is pretty mirthless, partly because it's so generic in its parody of hospital melodramas that its barbs are directed at too broad and unfocused a target. Though set in London, in these scenes everyone speaks with (shaky) American accents. Nichols seems to be vaguely referencing American TV shows like Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare, but it's hard to tell.

The black humor in the ward is familiar but more effective, with most of it rooted in hospital administrators, priests, and a matron (Maureen Pryor) blithely ignoring patients' needs while paying cheery lip service to visiting foreign dignitaries.

The National Health works best when there's less pushy human interaction among the patients. Here, the film honestly develops interesting and serious themes about misery loving company, about the aloneness of serious and terminal illness, and especially about the indignities of losing control of one's body and having to rely on others frankly unconcerned with trying to preserve it.

Despite a few parallels with Paddy Chayefsky's The Hospital, The National Health isn't quite a condemnation of Britain's health care system, though it does certainly point to its inadequacies. Instead, it's as much a reaction to the enjoyable but frivolous comedies about hospital life that had become a rich sub-genre of postwar British in comedies, epitomized by the "Doctor" films with Dirk Bogarde and the many Carry On films with hospital settings (Carry On Nurse [especially]; Carry On Doctor; Carry On Again, Doctor; Carry On Matron), several of which starred Jim Dale.

The cast is excellent, though it's unfortunate Redgrave's and Bron's major scenes are confined to the spoof sequences. However Blakely, Swift, Hutcheson, Johns, and Hoskins are all terrific.

Video & Audio

The National Health is presented in 16:9 enhanced widescreen, in a transfer with slightly muddy color and a mildly soft resolution, but it's okay. The region-free disc's English-only mono audio is also good. There are the usual chapter stops every ten minutes, and no alternate audio or subtitle options. No Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

Though it doesn't hold together, The National Health is definitely worth seeing for its cast and its considerable ambitions, some of which play well while other scenes fall flat. Mildly Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV's audio commentary for AnimEigo's Tora-san, a DVD boxed set, is on sale now.