Britannia Hospital (1982 - Lindsay Anderson)

Title: Britannia Hospital Year: 1982 Director: Lindsay Anderson Writer: David Sherwin Actors: Leonard Rossiter, Brian Pettifer, John Moffatt, Fulton Mackay Language: English Runtime: 111 min Released: 27 May 1982 Plot: Lindsay Anderson’s 1982 film Britannia Hospital is the third and final chapter in Mick Travis’s life journey — the first two being If . . . . (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973). Britannia Hospital, a grossly underrated Anderson film, is a chillingly prophetic parable-cum-pantomimic farce of the arc and relentless downward spiral of the Randian post-Thatcher/Hayek/Friedman/Keith Joseph NHS and British parliamentary party politics since the ‘age of Sid’. Mick Travis, the schoolboy protagonist in If . . . . , conflicted Loadsamoney fallguy in O Lucky Man! has been transformed into a recuperated 32-year-old undercover journalist investigating the experiments of demented Professor Millar while making a legitimate documentary about Britannia Hospital. The mise-en-scène is