Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 26 June

M*A*S*H (Altman, 1970)

Yesterday, hav­ing a beer with read­er MC of Mt Victoria, we were dis­cuss­ing which film I should cite in trib­ute to the late Donald Sutherland (who passed away late last week).

I spoke about him with Emile Donovan on RNZ last Friday and recom­men­ded per­form­ances in Ordinary People, Fellini’s Casanova and The Eagle Has Landed, but I thought I should watch some­thing I hadn’t seen before.

My plan was to watch the recently re-released Blu-ray edi­tion of The Day of the Locust (Schlesinger, 1975) but I was warned off as it is a pretty dark satire of Hollywood – described as a non-horror Horror film – and the Wikipedia plot sum­mary sug­gests that I could prof­it­ably leave that exper­i­ence for anoth­er day.

So, we cast around for a film that was both rep­res­ent­at­ive and avail­able and settled on Sutherland’s star-making per­form­ance in Robert Altman’s adapt­a­tion of Richard Hooker’s satir­ic­al anti-war nov­el, MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors.

(The film is best known as M*A*S*H but the title card presents it as MASH, as does IMDb.)

It’s the height of the Korean War and we are treated to the hijinks of the vari­ous char­ac­ters con­nec­ted to the 4077^th Mobile Army Surgiv=cal Hospital, less than three clicks from the front line.

Sutherland plays “Hawkeye” Pierce, Elliott Gould is “Trapper John” McIntyre and Tom Skerritt is “Duke” Forrest, the three doc­tors of the novel’s title. The char­ac­ter of Forrest didn’t make it into the tele­vi­sion adapt­a­tion, but dis­graced Major Frank Burns (played here by Robert Duvall) did.

I must say, it hasn’t aged well. Its sexu­al polit­ics were prob­ably dubi­ous even then, and the relent­less bul­ly­ing beha­viour by the sur­geons now just seems like power­ful men exer­cising their own enti­tle­ment rather than the anti-establishment atti­tudes we thought we were see­ing. Golf!

Where the film suc­ceeds is the bru­tal com­bin­a­tion of the lun­acy of the situ­ation and the real hor­rors that sur­round every­one. The open­ing cred­its – fea­tur­ing the fam­ous “Suicide Is Painless” song with lyr­ics by Altman’s 14-year-old son – resemble the TV ver­sion but with infin­itely blood­i­er and more dam­aged wounded sol­diers on the heli­copters. The long-running tele­vi­sion series, for all its vir­tues, san­it­ised that aspect of things as well as remov­ing Mike Altman’s dis­turb­ing lyrics.

Special men­tion needs to go to two sup­port­ing act­ors. Gary Burghoff’s “Radar” O’Reilly arrives fully formed in his first screen per­form­ance and also JoAnn Pflug as nurse “Dish” Schneider. Her char­ac­ter isn’t nearly as cruelly treated as Sally Kellerman’s “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan, but she’s still just a plaything for the boys.

Incidentally, this week marks the 74^th anniversary of the out­break of the Korean War. 

Where to watch M*A*S*H

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa, Australia and Canada: Streaming on Disney+

Ireland, USA and UK: Digital rental