Word: rigg
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Perhaps it's just a clever plot, but Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay of The Hospital hides almost the same assumption and a few more to boot. Rapist (George C. Scott, playing a doctor) and rapee (Diana Rigg) fall in love; Scott, his flagging potency restored, finds life worth living again; Rigg is cured of her nymphomania. Meanwhile life-and death-in a big New York City hospital goes on. The story evades numerous intriguing issues: Rigg has a potentially interesting madman for a father. He causes chaos in this wonderland of technological medicine, but he assures us that in Mexico...
Scott is about to commit suicide when Rigg walks in and provokes him into raping her. As she is the one who reaffirms his potency (he's halfdrunk, of course, and she's asking for it, so the rape is morally all right), it's quite conceivable that he should fall in love with her--an ex post facto defense of his actions, a justification of his renewed will to live, and so forth. But the film doesn't examine any of these possible motivations: "And so they fell in love." Period...
...Rigg's side of the affair is even more unexplained. Is Scott the first man who's resisted her advances for more than ten minutes? (She's certainly very enticing-and after the first five minutes it would be hard to misunderstand her intentions.) Or is it because he's the first one who's ever been more eager than she was when it came to the crunch? Or does he remind her of her father? This seems far-fetched when we meet the old lunatic in the hospital. He was once a doctor, Rigg relates, but if this...
...Diana Rigg as Heloise and Keith Michell as Abelard are lovers not so much star-crossed as celluloid-spliced. A playgoer might even feel that he was watching an ad trailer from the film-to-be. Thrill to A & H in a nude scene played in one-watt lighting. Chill as A is symbolically castrated by some sinister leprechauns left over from a ballet of yesteryear. Hiss the uncle. Chortle with a tipsy canon (Ronald Radd) and a tipsier abbess (Jacqueline Brookes). So much for medieval color. In dialogue. Playwright Millar has spared his audience the one line that...
...words from the man who flashed across 12th century Europe like a fiery intellectual comet. Keith Michell has a certain craggy charm, but the stuff of genius has not been written into his part, nor the anguishing ardor of his choice between his vows and his passion. Diana Rigg succeeds rather better, though she lacks vulnerability. There is a gritty, voracious sensuousness about her that finally makes it clear she has found and lost in this man the only god she could ever bring herself to worship. · T.E.K...