Buffalo State Hospital and The Natural
Monday, January 5th, 2009
A couple weeks ago I found a blog post at Forgotten Buffalo describing how parts of the classic baseball film The Natural 
About an hour and half into the movie, Robert Redford’s character Roy Hobbs is sent to a hospital. The Kirkbride plays the part of the hospital (not a psychiatric facility) and does a pretty good job I might add. There’s probably around twenty minutes worth of scenes inside the building. There are no views of the building’s exterior. Unfortunately, a lot of the shots inside Redford’s room (actually a medium-to-large dormitory style space he shares with other patients) are pretty “tight” and you don’t get to see much. But there are a few shots of a ward hallway which give you a sense of what a Buffalo ward looked like in the 1930s—even though in real life there probably would’ve been beds in the hall and other signs of overcrowding by that time. (more…)
