In The Hospital the screenwriter – director team of Paddy Chayefsky and Arthur Hiller does for modern medicine what it did for war heroism in The Americanization of Emily: They set out to score cheap, quasi-satiric points off a target so large and helpless that one is almost inclined to take pity on it, and fail even on their own cowardly terms.

No doubt about it, Richard Lester has “the knack”: considerable intelligence, explosive visual invention, unequalled cleverness with a camera. Petulia, his latest, parades these virtues – and reveals the defects which prevent him from becoming a major artist. Petulia starts with an almost insurmountable disadvantage...