7 morts sur ordonnance (1975) Reviews

• A true story...

  dbdumonteil2005-03-12

  ...but time has not treated Jacques Rouffio's flick kindly.Two stories within fifteen years of one another,two surgeons who committed suicide because of a an old doctor (Charles Vanel) and his offprings who could not stand competition.Using gossips,false rumors and slander,the clique gets away unharmed and can repeat its bad deeds again ,as the last picture shows. It is not easy to blend two stories and they do not hang well together.As he did not want the viewer to loose the vital lead ,Rouffio felt compelled to repeat his scenes .The best would have been not to show the Depardieu plot ,the weakest of the two . Doctor Berg is a caricature(the actor,27 at the time ,was too young ),complete with moustache,bow tie and hip suit .This is not an in-depth portrayal:you cannot claim that a surgeon epitomizes a "humane" medicine just because he climbs up the hospital wall to visit his patients or because he cheats in his chic gambling circle.The Michel Piccoli story is certainly more moving and the film should have focused on it,Michel Auclair's shrink character telling us what happened before.

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• Unfocused and pointless

  vostf2013-02-15

  The premise is the only redeeming part, and thanks to a great cast. It is most intriguing to have a story set in the medical society. The simple fact that private hospitals are run like businesses where patients are just customers leading to an invoice and a profit has potential as a dramatic subtext, especially with good surgeons, caring for their jobs and patients, at a loss in this "no holds barred" arena. Unfortunately, as pointed by the two previous reviewers, the film-makers made two wrong choices. First we don't need to experience the backstory of 10 years before. The cutting back and forth is really distracting and it doesn't move the story forward. Then here lies the biggest problem: the story is pointless. Probably because Director Rouffio and his screenwriter Conchon were stuck with the true story it is based on. But the intercut flashbacks are at odds with a documentary approach. So we are left to be content with an anecdotal storyline. Pity we didn't get a better movie with Piccoli, Depardieu and the rest. So much so that it is an endemic disease of French movies that the film-makers are so proud of their premise they don't care if the story leads somewhere.

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• Clinical, pointless, pretentious "thriller"

  gridoon20192011-02-20

  This film was apparently based on true events, however it offers absolutely no insights into them; despite all the pretentious and confusing switching back-and-forth in time, they remain just as inexplicably monstrous at the end as they were at the beginning. It tries to set up a kind of powerful-doctor-mafioso-evil-figure as indirectly responsible for the tragedies, but on the contrary he comes across as a very sensible person - he knew that something was wrong with both the surgeon who refuses to acknowledge his own medical problems (Piccoli) and the other surgeon who is a spoiled, cheating, overgrown brat (Depardieu). Besides, any movie that graphically shows the killing of little kids, not once but twice, crosses the line of acceptability in my book. The acting, for whatever that's worth, is fine, with Depardieu already showing his talent in one of his earliest roles, and Marina Vlady maturing beautifully. * out of 4.

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