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Alright, I'm almost done with the nominees for 1970, having now seen four out of the five (Only Love Story remains, god help me). Number four is the wartime comedy MASH, directed by Robert Altman and starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Robert Duvall, and Sally Kellerman. Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Richard Hooker, MASH follows the day-in-the-life screwball misadventures of two prodigious military surgeons during the Korean War, Captains "Hawkeye" Pierce and "Trapper John" McIntyre. Both doctors and their gaggle of debaucherous colleagues are virulent anti-authority mischief-makers/party animals, but they get away with repeated insubordination, hazing, pranks and scams due to their unrivaled skill in the operating room, and the inherent chaos of being stationed near the front line. This anarchic romp paved the way for cinematic progeny such as Stripes and Animal House, but also seems influenced by the work of The Marx Brothers (There's even a throwaway reference to Groucho's game show You Bet Your Life). And of course it was the inspiration for the landmark TV series.
I was actually surprised by how irreverent the film's tone was. MASH the TV show was a mix of sitcom tropes and heavy drama, and I went into this movie thinking it would lean more toward satire than zany farce. But Sutherland and Gould's antics resemble those of highly creative frat boys. They dispose of their stuffy, religious colleague Major Frank Burns (Duvall) by sneaking the hospital camp's PA microphone into his tent as he's getting it on with the new head nurse Major Margaret Houlihan, and later tease him about it to provoke a violent outburst that gets him sent away for a psych evaluation. They break Houlihan's spirit by collapsing her tent while she's in the shower (one of the film's gags that hasn't aged very well). They accept an offer to perform a routine medical procedure in Japan as a pretext to go golfing. They rig a football game against a rival hospital in order to collect on some big money bets (This scene brought to mind the climax of the Marxes' Horse Feathers). Hawkeye and Trapper John's antics are rather sophomoric considering their medical brilliance.
Following the novel's episodic structure makes for an entertaining series of comedy set pieces without a particularly strong narrative thrust. The one character with a real arc is "Hot Lips" Houlihan, who drops her overly buttoned-up attitude and becomes "one of the guys" after spending a few months with these hooligans. The dialogue has a very improvisational feel, with characters talking over each other in very naturalistic fashion. This was groundbreaking for the time but also made it easy to miss plot details.
Filming in Los Angeles locales, Altman kept the production cheap, down and dirty, partly because he was an untried director for a mainstream film but also because the studio had two big-budget war films in production, and he knew if he kept MASH under budget they wouldn't interfere. MASH was notable at the time for its comedic subversiveness, frankly sexual content, and a single use of the word "fuck," apparently the first instance in a major studio film. As the Hays Code had been abandoned two years earlier in favor of a ratings system, filmmakers had begun to break all sorts of longtime conventions, and MASH took advantage of this newfound artistic freedom. It may seem tame today but in 1970 this cheeky material was enough to earn an R rating.
Overall I enjoyed the film. In the spirit of the Marx Brothers' early work, our anti-establishment heroes relentlessly attack everyone regardless of rank or gender (though as I said, their treatment of poor Ms. Houlihan is a little uncomfortable through a 2025 lens), and their raison d'être seems to be "Have a good time all the time." Against the backdrop of a largely pointless war their iconoclasm is certainly infectious. But I think I was expecting something of a slyly satirical bent, a philosophical examination of the absurdities of war and its effect on the human condition (I haven't really watched it but I get the impression the TV show played more along these lines). MASH the film more resembles Animal House in a military hospital.
I give MASH *** out of ****.
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