Such Good Friends

Made in the same year as The Hospital, but the script by Esther Dale (Elaine May) is less of a medical exposé than Chayevsky's for the Arthur Hiller film, more of a brittle comedy about the rich at play while one of their number (Luckinbill) slowly dies in hospital after a simple operation - to remove a mole on his neck - goes disastrously wrong. Sadly, Preminger seems unsure whether to take May's characters at face value or to 'feel' for them. As a result, the cardboard emotions of Cannon (the wife seeking revenge for her dying husband's newly-discovered infidelities) and Coco (the family doctor who is losing his patient) are too often taken for real, and the script's brilliantly witty cameos are shunted too quickly out of sight.