Classic Review: MASH (1970)
Director: Robert Altman
Writer: Richard Hooker, Ring Lardner Jr.
Stars: Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt
Runtime: 116 minutes
PLOT: The staff of a Korean War field hospital use humor and hijinks to keep their sanity in the face of the horror of war.
REVIEW: MASH takes place mostly in Korea during the war. However, aside from the steady processing of bloody meat through the operating room, the film is not so much concerned with the war as with life inside the Army hospital unit and especially with the quality of life created by the three hot-shot young surgeons (Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Tom Skerritt) who make most things happen.
Living as they must in the midst of the Korean War, the characters of "MASH" become characters with whom we can identify, possibly even bond, because their methods of coping are authentic, their relationships are grounded upon both their need for connection and their astute awareness that any one of them may not come out of this thing alive.
Insane announcements over the hospital's intercom system, Japanese-accented popular American songs from Armed Forces Radio in Tokyo, bungling corpsmen, drivers, nurses—and again and again the brilliantly understood procedures of the operating room—come together to define the spirit of the film.
This film marked the beginning of Altman's sustained formal experiments with widescreen photography, zoom lenses, and overlapping sound and dialogue, further enhancing the atmosphere with the improvisational ensemble acting for which Altman's films quickly became known. Although the on-screen war was not Vietnam, MASH's satiric target was obvious in 1970, and Vietnam War-weary and counter-culturally hip audiences responded to Altman's nose-thumbing attitude towards all kinds of authority and embraced the film's humor and its anti-war, anti-Establishment, anti-religion stance.
MASH" isn't so much a war film, though an argument could surely be made for it being an anti-war film. Instead, however, "MASH" is about those individuals who live in the war zone by choice or by necessity. It's about how they survive and how they, ultimately, reflect each one of us.
Reviewed by Intisab Shahriyar
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