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M*A*S*H [Blu-Ray]

Director : Robert Altman

Screenplay : Ring Lardner, Jr. (based on the novel by Robert Hooker)

MPAA Rating : R

Year of Release : 1970

Stars : Donald Sutherland (Hawkeye Pierce), Elliottt Gould (Trapper John McIntyre), Tom Skerritt (Duke Forrest), Sally Kellerman (Maj. "Hot Lips" Houlihan), Robert Duvall (Maj. Frank Burns), Jo Ann Pflug (Lt. Hot Dish), René Auberjonois (Dago Red), Roger Bowen (Col. Henry Blake)

One of director Robert Altman’s favorite ways of describing how M*A*S*H got into theaters is, “It wasn't released from 20th Century Fox ... it escaped.”

Ahead of its time and still one of the most effectively subversive comedies ever to emerge from a major studio, it is of little surprise that there was some resistance in the upper ranks of 20th Century Fox to releasing M*A*S*H back in 1970. Although set in Korea, the connections to the politically charged and publicly unpopular war in Vietnam were too strong ... the mixing of bawdy, sexist comedy with gory, realistic scenes of surgery was too disconcerting ... the blatant contempt for any form of authority was too pronounced ... and on, and on, and on. What were they to make of a war movie in which the Army was made to look like a joke and the only gun fired is a referee’s pistol at a football game?

Yet, M*A*S*H did escape from the studio and make it into theaters, and all those qualities that studio executives worried about were exactly what made it so revolutionary. Simply put, there had never been a major movie like it before, and audiences responded to its brash mixture of realism and comedy and they sympathized with the anti-authoritarian stance of its difficult, but likable lead characters.

Based on a little-known 1968 novel by Robert Hooker, a veteran combat surgeon of the Korean War, M*A*S*H is told in loose, episodic style, with much of its dialogue improvised on set (much to the consternation of screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., one of the infamous Hollywood Ten who had been blacklisted since the ’50s). Director Robert Altman, who was at the time a nearly unknown director with only a handful of small feature films and TV episodes under his belt, understood the material when others didn’t, and he realized early on that the story’s subversive humor needed room to work; it couldn’t be constrained by the demands of traditional Hollywood narrative.

The various episodes center on a threesome of irreverent, but highly talented surgeons at a Mobile Army Surgery Hospital (hence the name, M*A*S*H) a few miles from the frontline in Korea: Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland), Trapper John McIntyre (Elliottt Gould), and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt). Hawkeye and company are not rigid Army professionals, but rather cocky, self-consumed young men who were drafted against their will and thus are willing to do just about anything to flaunt authority and discipline, especially in the form of the head nurse, a straight-laced military clown named Major Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).

What Hawkeye, Trapper John, and Duke hate most is hypocrisy, which they see everywhere, particularly in the authority figures (hence the nickname they give to Houlihan, “Hot Lips,” after they broadcast her breathy love tryst with another authoritarian figure, Robert Duvall’s Maj. Frank Burns, over the camp’s loud-speaker system). There is an element of the carnivalesque in everything they do, where the main point is the inversion of the power hierarchy--to make those in authority look foolish. At the same time, there is a deeply humanistic vein that runs throughout M*A*S*H, as Hawkeye and the others use their rowdy behavior as a form of psychologically distancing themselves from the horrors around them. The true ugliness they see is not their own prankish cynicism, but the stoic nature of Army routine despite the maimed bodies that are flown into their camp every day.

Thus, Altman understood that part of the effectiveness of the humor in M*A*S*H had to emerge from the juxtaposition of the jokes to the grisly elements inherent to a frontline Army hospital. Thus, his camera never flinches from the oozing gore of the surgery room, with the comical characters, caked in blood, trying to stop squirting arteries and extract shrapnel.

With its somber hues and military setting, M*A*S*H never really looks like a comedy; Altman doesn’t play to easy expectations by trying to make the setting bright and cheery. Rather, he uses the realism of the situation to heighten his characters’ idiosyncratic behaviors and unorthodox attitudes. Sometimes, he plays with the mise-en-scène, such as when he creates a visual parody of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper in the blackly comic sequence in which Painless (John Schuck) decides to commit suicide because he thinks his Don Juanism is a mask for latent homosexuality.

Of course, much of the humor in M*A*S*H is as politically incorrect as you can get. The aforementioned suicide attempt based on the fear of being gay is only one example. It is also hard not to see the constant harassment of Hot Lips as being provoked as much by her gender as by her square rigidity. Yet, in the end, the entire movie has such a subversive effect in every aspect that it’s pointless to single out particular groups that are insulted, since just about everyone is at one point or another. Although it is now best remembered as the beloved spin-off TV show that lasted for 11 seasons, in 1970 the word M*A*S*H brought to mind a particular attitude--a willingness to undercut authority as a way of checking the powerful--that an entire generation embraced.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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