Poet and novelist Kenneth Fearing is the source of this rather pretentious Studio One offering, directed no less by Franklin J. Schaffner a decade before his movie career. I found it more annoying and contrived than dramatically successful.
Fearing's novel "The Hospital" dates from 1939 and portrays with an ensemble cast many little stories and incidents at a General Hospital (at times it resembles the popular soap), with emphasis upon how they randomly interact. In this sense it reminds one of that series of Chaos Theory movies, like the Oscar-winner "Crash", but as a Live TV presentation it is rather confusing. Using the incident of the power going out in the hospital as a gimmick, repeating that blackout several times to climax each Act of the play is a literary device for storytelling that doesn't work well at all here.
The individual "human interest" stories are banal, and unlike a real soap opera where a large number of subplots are developed and resolved over the course of many episodes, this handy-dandy tying up of loose ends near the finish in time for a happy ending seems utterly phony.
Victor Jory as the hospital administrator on the verge of suicide provides the histrionics, while his son-in-law doctor Leslie Nielsen is bland in an early "straight" role. Better to start off watching him in "Forbidden Planet"!
