M*A*S*H. 1970. Directed by Robert Altman.

(2/16/01-2/20/01)

I wasn't particularly excited about seeing M*A*S*H and I didn't much connect with it. I'm generally not interested in anything to do with the military.

The film is episodic in nature; it has a loose structure. (It is certainly not as loose as Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty.) The problem here is that not all the episodes work equally well and when they don't they don't have the overall structure of the film to fall back on. I'm thinking in particular of that long, tedious football game at the end that sort of comes out of nowhere. Now, I don't like or understand football so it might have seemed worse to me than it did to someone else.

The set pieces can seem forced, such as the parody of the Last Supper with the guy who wants to commit suicide and who lays down in a coffin and also Hawkeye's and Trapper John's trip to Japan where they have been asked to come and perform an operation, but where they seem to take delight in antagonizing just about everybody and thumbing their noses at rules and procedures.

Robert Altman was considered such an innovative director back in the 1970s. His work had an unpredictable quality to it. He took chances--and they didn't always come off. M*A*S*H was his first big picture and that quality of freshness probably moved the original audiences.

The scene that made the biggest impression on me was when Major Burns and Major O'Houlihan are having a sexual interlude and somebody slips in a microphone and broadcasts their doings to the whole base, showing them up as hypocrites and earning Major O'Houlihan the nickname "Hot Lips." Major Burns is constantly making a show of religion and O'Houlihan is a strictly "by-the-book" officer, oblivious to the realities of the situation.

Sally Kellerman's Major O'Houlihan is a memorable character and her rigidness makes her an appropriate butt of jokes. In another scene, guys are arguing about something about her (I forget what) and they have to see her naked to settle the dispute. They arrange to have the building collapse around her while she is taking a shower. A whole group of people (I forget whether they are exclusively male) come and take seats outside the building like an audience. O'Houlihan, in hysterics, goes to Colonel Bates and threatens to resign her commission. "OK. Resign," he says indifferently. Interestingly enough, Colonel Bates is in bed with a woman at the time.

It is easy enough to laugh at O'Houlihan, but she does stand for some kind of order and without order there would be chaos. The need to impose some rules is necessary, as much on a military base (M*A*S*H) as in a girl's boarding school (Madchen in Uniform). Yet, order is equated with "authority" and "authority figures" and it is these people who have created the combat situation that people like Hawkeye and Trapper John have to cope with.

There is a lot of sex going on at the military base, mostly among people who are married. I think that this is pointing out the disruptions in family life caused by the war. So I can certainly understand the tendency to not respect the authority figures.

The operating room scenes are just grusome enough to bring home the pressures that the medical personnel live with. There are a few sickening moments, but the film doesn't dwell on them. And there is that awful, poignant scene where a doctor asks a young assistant for a hypodermic needle. He has trouble finding it and returns (I think) with the wrong kind. The doctor tells him that he was too late and tells him, "You killed him." The youth turns away with a look of real agony on his face. The doctor was horribly insensitive; maybe it was understandable given the circumstances. It is the most poignant moment in the film.

So a lot of the acting up is understandable, but that doesn't really excuse it all. When Hawkeye and Trapper John are summoned to perform an operation in Japan they seem to have a great time disrupting all procedures just for the fun of it. And I didn't find it fun to see them come in, take over and refuse to tell anyone who they were or why they were there. Other people had jobs to do there and those jobs, too, were important. They redeemed themselves a little by forcing the powers that be to allow them to perform necessary surgery on a pregnant woman, an act of humanity. This raises hackles with the people in charge, probably because they had been so inconsiderate up to that point.

It was great seeing Roger Bowen as Colonel Bates. He reminded me so much of Captain Binghamton on the McHale's Navy TV show.

M*A*S*H has a very interesting soundtrack, another quality we associate with Robert Altman. There are scenes with multiple people talking at once. The base broadcasts a Japanese radio station over the loudspeaker and we hear things like "My Blue Heaven" sung in Japanese. That loudspeaker also broadcasts information about the movies to be shown on the base and at the end it announces a showing of the movie M*A*S*H and continues with the credits of the movie istead of written end-credits. I really liked that touch.