Great position comedy. Having started watching “Mr. Pitkin in the Hospital” immediately after “Mr. Pitkin behind enemy lines”, I was already mentally ready for the fact that the film will not be as brilliant as it follows from numerous positive reviews – and it was even more pleasant to make a mistake when the beginning of the film exceeded all expectations!
The first half of the film is such a magnificent “comedy of positions” that it is impossible to make absolutely no claims to it in this regard. Perfectly staged and executed scenes with electric races, treatment of patients in the dentistry office or a silent scene in the director’s office are real pearls of the buffoonery genre. And what is the episode with the stretcher, which revealed the “theme of the stretcher” 100% and gave Leonid Gaidai material for a similar episode in the novella “Partner” from the film “Operation Y and Other Adventures of Shurik”! All these magnificent gags are accompanied by hilarious facial expressions, which here is an order of magnitude more than in “Pitkin behind enemy lines” – whether it is a homerically funny mimic duel of Pitkin and an orderly or the search for a mouth hole in a tangled beard, and all this – in a brilliant performance by Norman Wizdom. In general, if you evaluate only the first half of the picture, then as a representative of its genre, it would receive 10 out of 10.
Unfortunately, the authors of the film could not withstand the pace taken, and in the middle, where a melodramatic line was woven into the action taking place on the screen, the plot began to slip. The director tried to cure this with a new batch of gags - however, whether he ran out of fantasy, or what else, only the entire buffoonery in the second half of the tape is reduced to traditional dressing, falls and, relatively speaking, tort-throwing, against the background of the first part of the picture, looking, let's say, not achti - taking into account the almost complete disappearance of the mimic play of actors. As a result, instead of the non-stop laugh that accompanied the viewing of the first part, the viewer risks catching himself on the fact that his hand reaches for the rewind button.
Now on the whole movie. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the fans of the film, I must say that the attempt to introduce melodramatic elements and helpless “criticism of the consumer society” to the tape of this genre is for me personally nothing but an attempt to cross the hedgehog with the already. Films about Pitkin is initially pure, unadulterated, distilled buffoonery without the slightest admixture of any satire or parody, so pure that these tapes are difficult even to find analogues among modern comedies: almost all of them, regardless of their quality, carry either satirical or parody grain. The genius of the stunt comedy Gaidai, whose films are considered, in comparison with the tapes of other classical Soviet comediographers, the most frivolous and lightweight, against the background of Pitkin, will seem, without exaggeration, a genius of satire! Pitkiniada is an exclusively entertaining spectacle created in the name of laughter for the sake of laughter, so the above-mentioned “vaccinations” of other genres look at this buffoonery action ... in fact, they do not look at all. Imagine the melodramatic elements in the "Mask Show" and you will understand what is meant.
Based on all this, the second half of the picture I would rate 6 out of 10. The final estimate, respectively, is the average of the estimates of the first and second parts. Wizdom’s brilliant performance and unparalleled Soviet voice acting are present throughout the film, so the score will not be affected. I definitely recommend the film to watch. It is strange that it was played on TV much less often "Pitkin behind enemy lines", which was a frequent guest of our TV channels.
8 out of 10
P.S. Personally, I think I'm going to end here with the Pitkin epic. If "Pitkin in the Hospital" is considered the best, then the rest do not exceed the level of "Pitkin behind enemy lines" and deserve attention only as a film legacy. I've had enough of two members of the genre.