Robert Altman (1970)
I was fourteen when Robert Altman’s Korean War black comedy was released, probably a couple of years older when I saw it (for the only time until now, though I sometimes watched the TV spinoff). I remember not enjoying the film. I don’t remember why, except that I didn’t think it was funny. I do recall not admitting as much to others – grown-ups – who knew better and said different. M*A*S*H was more or less officially uproarious in the 1970s. It’s interesting to see it again the best part of half a century later, to dislike it strongly and to understand why.
You don’t need to be super-PC to now find M*A*S*H’s treatment of women and attitude towards homosexuality beyond the pale. The misogyny is repeatedly hard to take – especially the humiliation of bossy, self-righteous head nurse Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan (Sally Kellerman). The nurses shower outdoors, under cover of a makeshift tent. The film’s three prankster heroes – combat surgeons ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce (Donald Sutherland), ‘Trapper John’ McIntyre (Elliott Gould) and ‘Duke’ Forrest (Tom Skerritt) – engineer the tent’s collapse, exposing Hot Lips’ naked body to a sizeable audience of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital personnel, to settle a bet as to whether she’s a natural blonde. The other women in the camp are, throughout, either sex objects or undifferentiated onlookers. After the shower incident, Hot Lips marches straight to the quarters of the bumbling commanding officer, Henry Blake (Roger Bowen), to vent her fury. He’s in bed there with a sexpot nurse (Indus Arthur) – in this scene, a literally dumb blonde. By the time of the climactic (and interminable) football game – between the unit and an American evacuation hospital, on which Blake and his opposite number wager thousands of dollars – Hot Lips is merely the noisiest of the inane girl cheerleaders.
‘Painless’ Waldowski (John Schuck), ‘the best-equipped dentist in the army’, fails to perform one night and, fearing this means he’s a repressed homosexual, decides to take his own life. Hawkeye, Trapper and Duke arrange a feast staged to suggest Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’, and for the unit’s chaplain, Father Mulcahy (René Auberjonois), to give absolution to the suicide-to-be. They supply Painless with a tablet – a ‘black capsule’ that he believes will finish him off. Hawkeye persuades ‘Dish’ Schneider (Jo Ann Pflug), on the eve of her return to the US and the husband she’s stayed faithful to throughout her time in Korea, to spend the night with Painless, so as to reassure him he’s not really gay. Normal bedtime service is resumed and Painless returns from the dead a happy man. As for the defence that the film is only reflecting the misogyny and homophobia of the early 1950s, the director gives the game away during the cast curtain call (a trademark of his). There’s a single shot of each player. For Sally Kellerman, Altman chooses, among many possible options, the moment Hot Lips is revealed in the shower.
At this distance in time, something else, more substantially damaging, is wrong with M*A*S*H. The graphic gory wounds of the casualties wheeled in for emergency treatment may have been a mainstream cinema novelty in 1970; they’re also a reminder that the film, despite its historical Korean setting, is essentially concerned with an American military involvement in Asia that was ongoing and a matter of enormous political urgency. The body parts and bloody swabs littering the screen might seem to attest to its anti-war credentials but M*A*S*H is to a greater extent anti-authoritarian. What’s more, the struggle between the iconoclastic surgeons and the supposed powers-that-be is no contest: the heroes move from one knock-down vanquishing of sticklers for the rulebook to the next. Anti-authoritarian comedies with a military (or even a school) setting normally build up a sense of the obstructive force of the status quo – to give impetus to the independent-minded campaign that tries to upset it and eventually succeeds. Altman relies, rather, on the anti-Vietnam War predispositions of his presumed audience and their enraged frustration with the political establishment of the day. The immovable object, against which the irreverent mavericks of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital are rebelling, exists outside the film. Watching it now, without the in-built animus that so many of its original viewers must have brought to the experience, exposes the movie’s lack of self-sufficiency.
In some respects, M*A*S*H explicitly looks and sounds to be riding on the coattails of the 1960s counterculture. Visual details include Elliott Gould’s big moustache and Aloha shirt, the shades that he and Donald Sutherland both wear, even the length of the army chaplain’s hair. On the soundtrack, the mellow, melancholy theme song, ‘Suicide is Painless’ – music by Johnny Mandel, lyrics, remarkably, by Altman’s then young-teenage son Michael – is redolent of the era in which M*A*S*H was made, though it has also aged better than the film as a whole. Of course there are elements that were innovative fifty years ago and liable to be under-appreciated by twenty-first-century viewers accustomed to them – actors talking over each other, words heard in the margins of the action, the relaxed, throwaway playing of the leads. Perhaps even the voice that keeps making announcements over the camp’s public address system and getting things wrong was funny back in the day, though that’s hard to believe now.
Overlapping dialogue is used to great effect in the delivery of the very first lines of the script (by Ring Lardner Jr, who adapted a 1968 novel by Richard Hooker): Henry Blake issues orders to Corporal ‘Radar’ O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff), who anticipates his commanding officer’s orders even before Blake has uttered them. Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould are accomplished but self-satisfied. Tom Skerritt comes across differently – as a good actor in a nothing role. It’s no surprise the character of Duke was dropped from the TV M*A*S*H. In contrast, Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), the pompous, incompetent surgeon who departs the film at an early stage wearing a straitjacket, recovered to become a regular in the television series. (As with everyone bar Gary Burghoff’s Radar, Frank was played by a different actor on the small screen.)
As they work together in theatre, Hawkeye mutters grudgingly to Margaret Houlihan that she’s ‘a pain in the ass’ but ‘a damned good nurse’. The film, although it otherwise treats her as only a pain in the ass, uses the medical nerve and skill of the self-styled ‘Swampmen’ to underline their heroism – and give a righteous edge to viewers’ enjoyment of their outrageous insubordination. For this BFI screening of M*A*S*H, a fair number of the forty or fifty people in NFT1 (not bad for a matinee these days) must have been my age or even older. Perhaps there was a silent majority in the audience but there was also loud and persistent laughter and, at the end, some applause. These were the sounds of cultural nostalgia trumping wokeness.
22 June 2021
