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If you are a certain age, you may have been aware of the helicopters before you knew what they were. Maybe there were there, in the background, as your family sat in front of the TV. Maybe you started to watch the program yourself.
That short sequence: the blades whirring, the acoustic theme from “Suicide is Painless,” sits on the personal soundtrack of millions.
So, it comes as a bit jarring when Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H begins with the same sequence, but the men injured in the choppers are noticeably more bloodied and lifeless and the sound of the choppers cannot be heard. If you watch closely as the casualties are loaded onto ambulances, one stretcher is dropped on the muddy ground. This is a rougher cut.
And then there are the lyrics, never heard on the TV show:
The game of life is hard to play
I'm gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I'll someday lay
So this is all I have to say
Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it
If I please
There is a deep streak of fatalism in Altman’s M*A*S*H, a lasting sense of dysfunction that the TV show could only occasionally flick at. It’s understandable. That would be a difficult vibe to sustain for 26 episodes a year of a purported comedy. At some point, viewers need some hope, even during wartime.
Trapper, Duke and Hawkeye. Duke never made it to TV.
TV’s “M*A*S*H,” which Altman reportedly despised1, needed to paint in broad strokes to remain accessible and often that meant making explicit the thematic material that Altman preferred to keep somewhat in the background. In between hijinks, Hawkeye, as played by Alan Alda, and the other characters would often moralize about the futility of war and offer bracing observations on the stream of young soldiers they had to patch back together. But like with many successful sitcoms, the MASH unit ultimately became a kind of family, a dynamic that softened the premise’s harder edges. After all, this was ostensibly a comedy about wartime surgery, complete in its early years with an overbearing laugh track. It had to be careful not turn into a modern version of “Hogan’s Heroes” or go the other way and become distressingly maudlin. Most of the time, it charted the right path and became, incongruously, one of the most beloved TV shows in history.
(And let it be said right here that Alda’s Hawkeye was a hero of my young self, a self-aware cynic who was smarter, funnier, faster and more charming than anyone else, with an abiding sense of fairness and decency. And I consider a few seasons of the show some of the finest television ever made.)
Altman’s M*A*S*H is another animal. The camp is dirtier, the blood and gore more prevalent, the surgeons crasser and crueler – and to be honest – more misogynistic. 2There’s an absurdity to its comedy, as well as a deep desperation. Donald Sutherland’s Hawkeye isn’t the camp cut-up; he’s an arsonist who needles Frank Burns into a nervous breakdown. Elliott Gould’s Trapper John has an angry, impatient edge, is harsh toward women, and suffers no fools. Burns (Robert Duvall in an early role) isn’t a hapless clown but a Christian missionary who sees God’s glory in the combat. When Altman pulls in tight on Duvall’s eyes, you wonder if you have become privy to a maniac.
The pros from Dover.
If TV’s “M*A*S*H” was at heart about the futility of war, Altman’s M*A*S*H is about anarchy. Although set in Korea in the early 1950s, it was universally viewed as a comment on the Vietnam War, and the comment Altman seemed to be making was that America itself as an ongoing concern was suspect, that its center had not held. In that vein, nothing functions: not government (in staging the war); not the Army (disciplining the doctors is viewed as useless; they were too necessary to keep the war machine going); not the Church (Father Mulcahy seems eternally befuddled and never able to finish a sentence), not even an institution as sacred as football (the game is won by cheating and subterfuge). All throughout, by way of contrast, the announcer on the camp loudspeaker makes reference to classic Hollywood films of the World War II era in which themes such as patriotism and sacrifice seemed more straightforward.
There was nothing straightforward about Korea. The Korean War today is still referred to as the “forgotten war.” To millions of Americans, it seemed to be fought Somewhere Else, with murky goals and unclear sense of the enemy. In fact, Congress never declared it to be a war. It was known as a police action, an effort to keep the Soviet and China-backed North Koreans on their side of the line. In three years of fighting, the front barely moved. Broadcast TV had not developed to the point where the war would land in people’s living rooms, as it would years later with Vietnam, and so most Americans only had the vaguest sense of the conflict. No peace treaty was ever signed.
It isn’t easy to write about a film is lauded as M*A*S*H, a quintessential part of the New Hollywood. Altman’s naturalistic approach, his use of a broad ensemble, unbroken shots and overlapping dialogue, along with its murky cinematography and a production design that makes the viewer experience every cranny of the squalid camp, was revolutionary for its time. The movie moves like a freight train, enveloping you in its world before you even know what has hit you. You can only follow along as best you can and learn the names as you go. It serves as a vibrant and vital reminder that just a few years after defeating Fascism in World War II, American troops were again risking their lives in a battle against a totalitarian ideology. There was nothing cold about this particular war and as such, Altman’s M*A*S*H runs angry, bloody and hot.
WHERE CAN I FIND IT: M*A*S*H can be rented on Amazon Prime.
HEY, ISN’T THAT: A bunch of outstanding character actors made their debuts, but let’s go with Bud Cort, who plays the young orderly dressed down by Frank Burns. He would go on to star in Harold and Maude (1971).
DUST CLOUDS: Despite the fact that the U.S. had nuclear superiority over all other parties involved in the war, using nukes was largely off the table as Washington tried to keep the fighting as limited as possible. At one point in 1951, however, President Harry Truman ordered nine nuclear bombs along with some B-29 bombers to Okinawa. Obviously, they were never used.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 6/10. Both sides weren’t yet capable of launching nuclear ICMBs yet. Still, this was a shooting war with the Soviet and the Chinese, with nuclear bombs in the region for a short time.
LAST ENTRY: Terminal Velocity (1994)
NEXT ENTRY: Charlie Wilson’s War (2007): Support your local freedom fighter.
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Altman’s critique, expressed years later, is a bit hard to follow. He calls the show “racist” and the “antithesis” of what we were trying to do. You could argue, actually, that the show did more to try and humanize the enemy that the film took the time to. But Altman may have just been getting at how jarring the idea was of a antiwar film being turned into a situation comedy that ran for over a decade, the commoditization of what he intended to be a middle-finger to the establishment. Ironically, TV’s “M*A*S*H” ran so long that it ended up far outdistancing its roots in the Vietnam War, and when the show finally went off the air in 1983, the Cold War had heated up all over again.
The sore point for many who have appraised the film negatively in recent years is the treatment of Sally Kellerman’s Major O’Houlihan, who is humiliated in a scene younger viewers will likely find troubling. But she is far from the film’s only target; the film is laced with profanity, sexism and sometimes, racism. Altman seemed intent on his film being as objectionable as possible. You could argue Hollywood doesn’t make movies like this anymore, but then watch Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which similarly holds nothing sacred, and get back to me.