MASH (1970)

I realize that this movie has achieved almost cult status and is widely regarded as a classic, but it just didn't work for me. The best thing I can say about it is that it gave birth to the long running television series of the same name, which may still be the best television series ever made. But how anyone could watch this movie and get the idea to make it into a television series is beyond me.

I readily confess, of course, that (as with almost everyone born in the 1960's or later) my introduction to and conception of MASH is the TV series. It's truly difficult for me to relate to Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye Pierce, for example. Not that he, or any of the actors, did a bad job. It's just that the TV series is so ingrained in my mind that it's hard to see different actors putting their unique spins on familiar characters. Hawkeye, Trapper John (Elliott Gould), Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), Hot Lips Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and Col. Blake (Roger Bowen) are portrayed very differently than their TV counter-parts. That's fine (and the actors did well) but it's still disconcerting.

The problems I felt with this movie went far beyond the difficulties involved with relating to an unfamiliar cast playing familiar characters, though. The story focuses on the experiences of Captains Pierce and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt) at the 4077 MASH in the Korean War. It opens with their arrival and closes with their discharge. But to me the movie lacks any clear focus or consistency. It doesn't seem to be building to anything and in the end it just fizzles out quietly without any real climax. The zany antics of the doctors come across here as mean-spirited more than fun, and there's way too much emphasis on the football game between the 4077 and the 325th Evac. I mean - who really cares? To me, this movie didn't even seem to have a strong anti-war message. Anti-military perhaps, but not anti-war (and the two are not the same thing, in my opinion.)

I realize that I'm not in tune here with most people's thinking, but as far as I'm concerned the best thing about this movie is actually hearing the words to the familiar MASH theme: "Suicide Is Painless." I also appreciated the fact that, this being a motion picture rather than a TV series, the horrors of war (ie, the wounds of the soldiers) could be more graphically (and therefore more soberingly) portrayed. Aside from that, nothing much here appealed to me.

2/10

Fmovies: This is truly the best military comedy ever made. It is funny, yet it realistically depicts the savagery of war and the non-chalance it gradually inspires in its victims. For example, some of the funniest, yet also most disturbing, moments in the film come when the doctors are operating on wounded soldiers, complete with gruesome sound effects, yet are discussing extremely trivial matters.

The film also benefits from some great performances. Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould were excellent as Hawkeye and Trapper John. They both had a streak of good movies during the 70s. Robert Duvall is amusing as a pious major whose fanaticism drives our heroes to extreme measures. Sally Kellerman and Tom Skerrit also put in good performances in their roles; it is a pity that these two actors are not better utilized nowadays.

"MASH" broke barriers and defied conventions when it was first released in 1970. It still does today.

The pendulum has swung back a lot since 1970, and for that you still get a sense of the pioneering spirit with which the film was made. The overlapping dialogue. The non-linear, character-driven plot. The caustic humor. The attacks on religion (real religion, as the New York Times noted when the film came out, not false sanctimony but actual belief in God.)

Yes, in those ways the film is as powerful now as it was when it was first released. But you see something else, something audiences didn't see in 1970, so blown away were they by the newness of it. That is the picture runs out of gas halfway through.

You have a powerful beginning, that eerie montage with the strange song "Suicide Is Painless" playing mournfully while doctors, nurses, and orderlies silently rush to relieve choppers of their human cargo. It's quietly effective, immediately giving you a sense of the 4077th MASH unit (looking much bigger and grimmer than it ever did in the TV series) and coming as close as the movie ever does to delivering an effective anti-war statement. The movie builds from there as we meet the various characters, beneficiaries of their actors' strong improvisational work. It feels like real-time eavesdropping on a community of actual human beings. Scenes like Major Burns and Hot Lips' transmitted tryst and Painless Pole's suicide attempt are not as funny as we are meant to think, but they are well shot, especially the Painless Pole bit, the best thing in the movie for pure entertainment. The way all the guys in the Swamp crack up when Painless tells them he's decided to kill himself may be the film's funniest moment.

What happens next feels like a wrong turn. Hot Lips becomes the subject of a camp bet that exposes her to massive humiliation. Call it "indecent" or "politically incorrect," it is just plain wrong, exposing the film's (and its director's) nasty streak toward women and alienating any concern you might have built up for the characters. When she and Burns were targeted before, you had a sense they had it coming because of her overbearing military approach and his blaming orderly Boone for killing a patient. This time, she's a spent force, no threat to anyone, and "a damn good nurse," as Trapper says, just doing her job as best she can despite her earlier bad experience. I'm struck dumb at the idea I'm supposed to be laughing when she rushes into Col. Blake's tent in shock and tears.

The film never recovers. Instead, it veers wildly off course, away from the camp and into two radically pointless subplots, one involving a trip by Hawkeye and Trapper to Japan where they operate on a congressman's son and a sick infant (some sort of parallel there, though lost on me), the other a football game that apparently was director Robert Altman's comment on the folly of war, but to me just shows what happens when you allow your characters to veer off-script for so long you can't make it back to the ending as written. The game takes up too much time, throws in goofy circus music complete with slide whistles, and features the once iron-willed Hot Lips in the role of outlandishly enthusiastic cheerleader for all the people who tormented her so viciously for the duration of the film. Sally Kellerman's performance in the second half of the film is nothing like it was in the first half; it's

MASH fmovies. As comedies go, it doesn't get much better than M*A*S*H! Script, direction, casting, music and acting are all at their very best in this satirical take on the Korean War - ironically, there is no army action played out during the movie, just the escapades of Elliot Gould, Donald Sutherland, et al where they are stationed to take in casualties of war.

From the opening shots we feel the slow mood of the film, yet if we look a little closer, we see comedy and havoc all around. This is in my opinion, Altman's finest piece - the film is superbly shot, showing fantastic long shots, typical of the era. Elliot Gould has never been so cool, and Donald Sutherland's dryness is sublime. The cast as a whole are the driving force behind this movie - the actor's clearly have taken time to learn their character's, and it really shows, right down to Radar's communication with the field Marshall (or whatever he is). It is very much a character driven movie.

The football game just shows what these people are really like - fun, scheming, lovable cheats - but it pays off because the opposition is so loathsome.

Beautifully written, shot, acted and the rest. Without a shadow of a doubt this is a 10 out of 10 and one of the best comedies around.

I thought Altman's "Nashville" was brilliant. "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" was a solidly "different" western. MASH, on the other hand, manages to bore and rankle at the same time.

What's right with MASH: ingenious innovations in technique, like a loudspeaker within the movie helping to announce the final credits and a comic eating scene shot to resemble the layout of Da Vinci's "Last Supper." Clever! Yawn. (These bits neither advance the plot, contribute to characterization or ambiance, or do anything except exist. Some viewers will laugh at the moment of recognition, but playful directing doesn't make a good film all by itself.) Another possible innovation is the use of a Simon&Garfunkly theme ("Suicide is Painless") that has no bearing on the movie or much else in the world. If Altman thought this bit up all by himself, it's clever. Yawn.

The cast does the best they can with so little of interest to work with.

I didn't find MASH funny, for reasons that many others have mentioned. Its worst sin against humor, to my mind, is that the "fun" here is based entirely on a the antics of a few angry and arrogant narcissists. I'd have called them "psychos," but that would make them sound too interesting. The fact that they're also brilliant surgeons doesn't outweigh their mental-health issues, unless you get a lump in the throat just watching SOB's save lives.

"All Quiet on the Western Front" is anti-war. "Paths of Glory" is anti-war. You don't need to be told that because they show war itself as cruel and dehumanizing, right up on the big screen.

"MASH" is not antiwar, and would be pretty poor even it were, because most of the dehumanizing is done by the protagonists themselves. It was *marketed* as antiwar (something quite different) because being antiwar *sold* in 1970. The posters that showed a peace sign morphing into a leggy babe had nothing to do with the movie except to convince people that it was "anti-war" and therefore great, sexy, hilarious, and more than worth the price of admission. In fact, MASH is none of these things.

Hawkeye, Trapper John, and their buddies are not against war or even *the* war. They do and say nothing about any war. All they do and say is whatever they feel like, tormenting female nurses, outsmarting superior officers, taking their petty vengeance and unmotivated peevishness out on everyone around them. Sound funny? Wrong. The Marx Bros. might have been able to pull it off, but not this crew.

MASH is anti-authority, but that's a whole lot different from being anti-war. MASH is also anti-military, but in a motiveless way (unless raking in the bucks was a motive). All the army ever did to these distinguished surgeons was to replace, temporarily of course, their zillion-dollar a year civilian careers with the opportunity to play golf, football, and crude practical jokes while occasionally saving of patients whom they obviously do not give a **** about personally.

The primary "anti-war" message here is that surgical operations involve lots of blood squirting around. That's it. Why not say MASH was is "anti-surgery" or "anti-medical profession" movie? Because that would nail the picture for the fraud it really is.

(Note: I know that medical students can be krazy kut-ups, especially when it comes to spare cadavers. MASH is a lot less funny.)

Strange film; basically entertaining, but not exactly a masterpiece. One of the most likable things about Robert Altman is that every film of his has been in some way an experiment, and almost none of these experiments, even the very good ones, work perfectly. This is a great example. As is obvious from the many user comments here, it's difficult to talk about "MASH" without comparing it to "M*A*S*H," and in fact the most important cultural thing the film may have done is establish an aesthetic universe for the TV series to exist in (and that really is the only thing the film and the TV show have in common – as many have pointed out, the tone, style, timing, and even character personalities are quite different between the two). But taken on its own, "MASH" is not really the anti-war polemic it's been made out to be, nor is it the joke-driven movie comedy we might expect from the series' style. Instead, it's a kind of exercise in black-comic tone; it subverts the idea of war not by explicitly criticizing it, even through jokes, but rather by being exactly the opposite of what we expect a traditional war film to be. Here we don't see courage or valor or heroism or honor; we see cowardice and nastiness and vice and stupidity, even from the "good" characters. The movie subtly suggests that war makes ordinary people into silly, stupid, and vicious ones, and Hawkeye and Trapper are no more exempt from this law than Frank Burns; in fact, if anything they are more angry and mean than he is. This unusual approach to the subject matter is well-maintained throughout the film, and never becomes too harsh or ugly – and yet Altman missteps with some oddly chosen episodes (Painless's "suicide attempt," for instance, and the overlong, if symbolic, football game), and the ending of the film is abrupt, making what's come before seem even more pointless and inconsequential. Which may be exactly Altman's point, of course . . . so here we have another Altman film that manages to be simultaneously witty, jokeless, boring, entertaining, confusing, beautifully thought out, artfully constructed and artless, symbolic and realistic. It's recommended, but viewers should ideally go into it with no expectations whatsoever. 7 out of 10.