Coma (film)

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Coma
Directed by Michael Crichton
Produced by Martin Erlichman
Written by Robin Cook (novel),
Michael Crichton (screenplay)
Starring Geneviève Bujold,
Michael Douglas,
Elizabeth Ashley,
Rip Torn,
and Richard Widmark
Music by Jerry Goldsmith
Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s) January 6, 1978
Language English
IMDb profile

Coma is a 1978 suspense film based on the novel Coma by Robin Cook. The film rights were acquired by director Michael Crichton, and the movie was produced by Martin Erlichmann for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The cast included Geneviève Bujold, Michael Douglas, Elizabeth Ashley, Richard Widmark, and Rip Torn.

The film is in color with stereo sound and runs for 113 minutes. It is notable for the intense paranoia which pervades the film, similar to other films of the 70s such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Conversation, The Stepford Wives, and earlier, Rosemary's Baby.

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[edit] Cast

[edit] Synopsis

Susan Wheeler, a young doctor, discovers many mysterious cases in which at Boston's Memorial Hospital patients are comatose after surgery. After discovering that the reason for coma appears to be brain damage, Dr. Wheeler embarks upon a quest to find why.

[edit] Full plot details

Susan Wheeler (Geneviève Bujold) is a surgical resident at Boston Memorial Hospital, a close analogue of Massachusetts General Hospital, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Her closest friend, Nancy (Lois Chiles), goes to the hospital for a routine abortion but ends up in a chronic vegetative state. Aided by an alcoholic but observant maintenance man and a computer analyst whom she persuades to produce a report not required by his job, Wheeler begins an investigation and discovers a number of similar accidents, certainly more than would occur at random. All of them were healthy, young patients having elective surgery, such as abortions; all wound up mysteriously brain-dead while on the operating table—in Operating Room 8. Among the suspects are her boyfriend, Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas), who is the chief surgical resident; Dr. George Harris, the chief of surgery (Richard Widmark); Dr. George, the chief of anesthesiology (Rip Torn); a mysterious truck driver; and others. Her investigations take her to the mysterious Jefferson Institute, run by a "nurse" (Elizabeth Ashley) rather than a doctor, where she uncovers the truth when she discovers the remains of another of the victims, Sean Murphy (Tom Selleck). He is lying on an operating-room (or autopsy) table with organs missing, while a telephone auction is going on in the background.

She discovers that the patients had been murdered while on the operating table due to substitution of carbon monoxide for oxygen. The brain-dead patients were transferred to the Jefferson Institute: a very impressive building from outside, provided with viewing rooms where family members could see their loved ones receiving standard hospital care: firm bed, clean sheets, tubes and wires, and beeping monitors. In reality, patients are only moved to the viewing rooms by prearrangement—no unannounced visits are allowed—and patients are kept, long-term, in a huge room, hanging from a high ceiling by wires attached to steel rods through the long bones, which allows them to be kept in a level, head-up, or head-down position by adjusting the traction wires. The same tubes and electrical wires are present as in intensive care: All inputs are controlled and all outputs are monitored by one huge computer in its own room. (The film was made before personal computers were common: All computers were big, blue, and far away.)

The organs of these patients were being sold on the international black market, by a telephone auction. When the organs are sold, the patient is moved to an operating/autopsy room, where the organs are removed, packed in ice, and rushed by ambulance to Logan Airport for shipment to other hospitals, where surgical teams are waiting to transplant the organs into desperately ill (and wealthy) patients.

Just as Wheeler discovers all this, she is noticed on the institute's extensive security system, whereupon armed guards and dogs chase her around the building. Using the tried-and-true movie tactic of hiding in a suspended ceiling, Wheeler eventually escapes from the institute on top of an ambulance.

She races back to Bellows and tells him the whole story of what she's found, but he doesn't believe her, which leads her to think maybe he's part of the conspiracy. She races out of their apartment and to Boston Memorial, where she breathlessly tells the chief of aurgery, Dr. Harris, of her discovery. He offers her a drink: Scotch on the rocks, with something extra the audience never sees clearly. Dr Wheeler promptly doubles over in pain.

Dr Harris diagnoses appendicitis. Since he's a brilliant surgeon and available at the moment, he schedules her for an appendectomy—stat—in Operating Room 8, the room with the carbon monoxide fitting. On the way to the OR, she whispers to Bellows (who has come to the hospital looking for her) where she is going. Finally believing her, he goes into hidden areas of the hospital, where the oxygen and carbon monoxide tanks are kept, and traces the CO tube through a maze of twisty, little passages and up and down ladders to OR 8, where he manages to turn off the carbon monoxide flow, and things are quickly resolved. Wheeler and Bellows both survive, and the villains are disgraced or do the honorable thing, which in this case might be better accomplished with a loaded syringe than a loaded revolver. (IV Fentanyl would be suitable and would be available to a chief of service).

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