Word: bujold
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King of Hearts' secret may have been its genteel anti-war message, as well as the superb performances by Genevieve Bujold and Alan Bates. Brackman notes that the message may not be quite so forceful in the post-Vietnam musical version. "It's certainly not, as is, a Vietnam statement, but it is kind of a war statement, within the parameters of a musical. We did, for a while, try to inject a harder edge into it, but really, all of that has fallen by the wayside. It's a fairy tale...
...Exorcist look positively expressionistic. Richard Widmark plays the head of a Boston hospital where young, healthy patients keep going into unexplained comas during routine operations. When he explains why he's doing it--the unimportance of the individual compared with the advancement of science--to a drugged Genevieve Bujold, the young doctor who has stumbled onto the terrible secret, the scene rings familiar. Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill and a thousand others have been here before, and one wonders why Widmark isn't indulging in similar eye-rolling or stuttering. Crichton forces him to become a stoic...
Genevieve Bujold is a wonderful actress--unfailingly charming--but here she battles four forces which succeed in overwhelming her: the hospital administrators, her skeptical fellow-surgeon lover (Michael Douglas), Crichton's tedious script, and her own French accent, which, despite her valiant attempts to obscure it, makes more comebacks than Napoleon. She does give Coma its interesting moments, however; when she climbs a ladder, the camera looks up her dress with unabashed voyeurism...
Just after the big autopsy scene, with that great shot of the salami-slicing machine sectioning the brain of Genevieve Bujold's best friend, who died as a result of going into a mysterious coma during a routine abortion, but just before the neat bit where Bujold gets chased through the big refrigerator where the frozen corpses hang by their heads, there is a really fantastic murder by electrocution, and they don't just dim the lights to let you know the juice is on, or anything corny. You get a head-on view of the dying...
...Cook's story has it, highly placed bad guys in "Boston Memorial Hospital" are selling human organs illegally, and they are willing to do anything to ensure a fresh supply. The flower-like Bujold, who does not look tired enough to have finished medical school, plays Dr. Susan Wheeler, a brilliant surgical resident who stumbles prettily from creepy suspicion to grisly certainty. But no one in the hospital, including the kindly chief of staff (Richard Widmark), will take her seriously. Her lover, a crass young intern (Michael Douglas) who looks as if he will make a great golfer some...