MASH

by Jerry Roberts

The opening text informs us that we are in Korea, we correctly assume sometime in the early days of the war. Director Robert Altman didn't want it that way, he wanted all references to the Korean War removed so that MASH would seem more universal, that all wars look the same, that all wars are fought for the same reasons, that the blood is always the same color and that the only difference between one war and another are the uniforms. Without that text most audiences would have assumed that this was a comedy about Vietnam, which at the time of the film's release was a wildfire still burning out of control.

This was 1970 and the time was right for MASH, a film that affirmed the kind of anti-etablishment sentiments begun with Easy Rider and that would continue for the next two decades. It was the antithesis of the kinds of movies that unified the government and Hollywood's propaganda machine during World War II and that the McCarthy nightmare severed.

It is difficult to imagine that film in different hands because Robert Altman seemed to be tailor made to direct it. He had been toiling around in television and small feature films but hadn't yet had his breakthrough. His approach was unique, a multi-layed palet populated by at least two dozen characters who wander in and out of the frame like players in a home movie. He allowed characters to talk over one another sometimes with conversations happening in the foreground and the background and off to the side to give the film a sense of population. Altman has never been interested in a singular plot and scenes often feel disconnected which gives the characters more room to move and more room to speak freely because they aren't locked into a chess game plot that moves them from one story element to another.

This was unheard of from a Hollywood film so it was Altman's good fortune that 20th Century Fox's studio heads had their attention focused on two other epic war projects, (Patton and Tora! Tora! Tora!) so they didn't make time to get in the way of the production. Altman said that he learned that the way to keep the suits off the set was to keep things on schedule and under budget. I don't want to imagine MASH (or any of Altman's other films) with studio tinkering.

I can't imagine this film as a standard comedy. Without the manic pacing, without the editing the movie would have seemed stale. The craziness comes from Altman's ability to take the material and throw out all convictions. There are moments when the word absurd seems to be an understatement. How else do you tell the story of a bunch of surgeons in a MASH unit who are knee deep in blood, guts and body parts who balance those horrors with martinis and practical jokes.

For the characters, creative casting is the key. Hawkeye and Trapper John don't need to be played as well-established characters but must seem like they've just dropped in, like two wise-acres who just happen to have found their way in front of the camera. They are a mixture of profane attitudes and miraculous surgical skills. Their hands work to retrieve young boys from the jaws of death while they mumble wisecracks back and forth.

If you see it from a literal point of view, it seems unbearably cruel. How could surgeons hack and sew through an assembly line of wounded teenagers and seemly not care? I think all of the antics are a defense because if you suffer emotional turmoil over patching a man's intestines together day after day you're likely to end up in the funny farm.

We meet the doctors as lighthearted but smart men who haven't a bit of use for their surroundings nor for those who perpetrate the mad notion of making war in order to make peace. Altman trusts his audience, he knows that this was not a war but a police action (which is basically a war minus the paperwork). They aren't sure why they're there but they know what they are there to do. They pull pranks, play golf, sip martinis and manage to patch together the brutal realities of what is happening three miles away.

Within the frame of the movie, the enemy isn't North Korea or Mao's red China but army brass who affirm this madness with a stolid military indifference. For this we are given Major Margaret O'Houlahan, a dim-bulbed major who (the movie suggests) has gotten her promotion through means other than hard work. Then there is Frank Burns, a humorless religous zealot who's cruelty of the junior staff leads Hawkeye and Trapper to arrange for his vacation to the laughing academy.

There has never been a war movie before or since that shifted it's focus so brilliantly. Altman takes advantage of the fact that military surgeons don't live by army regimine and are free to break the rules at will. They take even the most rudimentary circumstance and turn it on it's ear. Take for example the film's best scene, in which "Painless Pole" Waldowski (John Shuck), the camp dentist whose impotence has led him to believe that his latent homosexuality has flowered (nevermind the three girlfriends he's engaged to back home). Hawkeye and Trapper respect his desire to want to kill himself and even arrange it for him in a ceremony in which he is given a placebo that puts him into a deep sleep. He wakes to sex with one of the nurses and the next morning he's hale and hearty. The scene is the picture of sacralidge when the group gathers around the table in a pose reminiscent of the last supper. They even asked the camp priest to give him absolution.

This was very much a movie of it's time. It echoed the madness of the war and the anti-war movement and somehow it still seems to work. The attitudes about war bourne out of the Vietnam war still echo today and that makes MASH not just comedy but commentary.