M*A*S*H (1970)

Nominated for Best Picture of 1970, M*A*S*H is perhaps best known nowadays for having spawned one of the most successful television series in history. I always loved the show and its dark sense of humor even in the days when the networks were still using laugh tracks to tell us when something was funny. The movie version is quite different, of course, particularly given that you don't have as much time to develop the characters the way that the show could. Still, it's an entertaining film, making some of the same trenchant observations on the craziness of wartime that the TV show did (but doing them first, of course).

Like most films directed by Robert Altman, this one has very little in the way of a plot. Two talented surgeons (Hawkeye, played by Donald Sutherland, and Duke, played by Tom Skerritt) are sent to work in a Korean War hospital, a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, to be specific. Neither one is fond of following orders, a trait that Army officers tend to disapprove of. They are joined later by a gifted chest surgeon, Trapper John (Elliot Gould). Most of the movie is devoted to individual scenes of the attempts by these three men to maintain a sense of their own sanity through the use of humor. They manage to rid themselves of the religious hypocrite Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), they ridicule and embarrass Burns' accomplice (Hot Lips, played by Sally Kellerman), and they even squeeze in a bit of golf now and then. And the football game that serves as the focus of the second half of the film is a riot, with each side engaging in increasingly dirty tricks. Rather than follow a single thread of a plot throughout the movie, what Altman and his screenwriters choose instead is to have a series of incidents that reveal who these people are and how they feel, especially the strength of their emotions about the military and its attempts to bring democracy to places like Korea. The episodic nature of the movie does not diminish its comedic (or any other) impact in any way.

M*A*S*H is, of course, a commentary on war itself and the insanity that surrounds war. Although the film is set in Korea, everyone knows that it is really about Vietnam and how the military was completely out of its element fighting that war. None of the military leaders in the movie seem to have a clue what is going on; they are a collection of bumbling, incompetent fools. You'd have to turn such a movie into a comedy or you'd likely face the wrath of the Pentagon. And the humor here is pretty cynical and bleak at times. Watch the doctors try to help the camp dentist commit suicide, and try to keep from laughing as they create a tableau reminiscent of the Last Supper. (That he's trying to commit suicide because he now thinks he's gay since he can't get an erection is really quite the stupidest of premises, to be frank.)

The film opens in the same way as the television program always did, with helicopters bringing in wounded. Those helicopters show up a lot during the movie, and Altman never spares us from the blood spilled during wartime. Numerous scenes take place in the surgical unit, and there's much more of an emphasis on the casualties of battle than you might think. It's an interesting juxtaposition the film makes of the moments of laughter and the time healing wounds, but perhaps that's meant to explain why the surgeons in the camp need to have some of their sillier moments such as trying to determine if Hot Lips is a "true" blonde, leading to a shower scene that's almost as famous as the recreation of the Last Supper mentioned above.

Only Gary Burghoff, playing company clerk Radar O'Reilly, also starred in the television show. The rest of the cast were replaced even though their characters retain most of their traits from the film version. I know some people prefer the film version, and others really enjoy the television series more. To me, they're so very different from each other. A film has to capture your attention and quickly give you a sense of the characters, and M*A*S*H does just that. You get a sense of just how iconoclastic these doctors are and how out of place they are in the military structure. Television has the luxury of a slower pace, revealing bits and pieces of characters over time, and the series accomplishes that as well. I still think the film and television versions fit together nicely, and I'm glad that the quality of the movie inspired a quality TV show. We've certainly seen enough examples in recent years that the reverse is seldom true.