***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on the novel by Richard Hooker
directed by Robert Altman
by Walter Chaw On the shortlist of Robert Altman masterpieces, MASH compares best with his The Long Goodbye in that both are unapologetically informed by the cult of masculinity: fucking and fucking people up. Tenderness in the film is someone breaking their hand on someone else's head when that someone else says something stupid to a kid. Better, it's giving a different kid a stroke magazine to counteract his de facto religious training at the hands of an obvious nutjob (who's nutty mainly because he's trying to impose enlightenment where enlightenment cannot by definition exist). Accordingly, matters of spirituality and men of the cloth are to be scoffed at while other rituals–like the rites observed in an operating theatre, or golf (a game played with clubs), or football, or the pursuit of women–are regarded with the obsessive gravity of a lower primate. It's about male bonding, all that cruelty towards women and disrespect of authority and open racism–the game of me-against-you in a film that, contrary to popular consensus, isn't a Hellerian satire about the absurdity of war, but what may be the saddest war film ever made in that it identifies conflict as something that, however contrary to civilization, is inextricably hardwired into our bestial nature. We're vile, stupid, ignoble apes and we aspire to ideals we're eternally incapable of honouring.
Altman reduces men to clans of monkeys in MASH (and its title is not only an acronym, of course, but also a dual-descriptor of the will to destroy and, in antiquated slang, the active courtship of women); it's not highbrow, it's slope-browed. The lost original ending to Dr. Strangelove (another doom-filled anti-war film) has the war room erupting in an extended custard-pie fight, an unsubtle reduction of warfare to chimps throwing shit (progressively more sophisticated shit, but shit nonetheless) at each other. Not ten years later, MASH is roughly that sequence extended to feature-length. Interestingly, Altman will contract this idea back into one scene again in The Long Goodbye by summarizing the bleakness of men and their will to power when unctuous gangster Augustine (Mark Rydell) brutalizes his girlfriend to illustrate a point to his rival. He essentially beats his chest, bares his teeth, and pisses on his territory. When surgeons Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Duke (Tom Skerritt) saunter into the tent-town of this Korean War-era mobile army surgical hospital, see in them the disappointment of a generation thrown to the wolves by a government that lies to them, as well as the evocation of Eastwood's man with no name: rape, mayhem, and vengeance on his mind.
In its way, it's the precursor to our cinema of nihilism in the post-millennium: the hyper-masculine films of Japan translated now into horror remakes and V for Vendetta and back then, by Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, into dark westerns and, surprise, by Altman into a dirge for the inescapable fact of mutual destruction. His style of interlacing non-dialogue cuts in perfectly with the vagaries of man-to-man communication, so that all the humour of MASH, such as it is, is involved in cut-downs and macho rejoinders, 'mashed' together into a lattice of expression/feedback/overlap. Old Hollywood screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. hated what Altman did to his staid adaptation of Richard Hooker's staid novel because Altman boiled away the muddled meat of literary pretension intended to smokescreen the essence of war: blood on the one side and semen (well, the urge to resist the truncation of line) on the other. Remove the terms that valorize conflict and you'll discover the selfish cell preoccupied with its own survival. There's no trick in identifying what it is about MASH that inspires an analysis of it as satire–the trick is identifying MASH as anthropological: a piece that in spite of (or because of) its disjointedness constructs a mosaic of our repressed inhumanity, the heroes providing the final straw in the sanity of Frank Burns (Robert Duvall); the humiliation of Hot Lips (Sally Kellerman) in a shower; the inchoate tribalism at root in team sport; and, best, the Last Supper/Beggar's Banquet tableaux reconstructed as a ceremony revolving around a martyr's suicide and the ecstatic resurrection of his flaccid member.
Sutherland is extraordinary, as is Elliott Gould as Hawkeye's pal, Trapper John–with apocryphal tales confirmed within the DVD's "Backstory" that Sutherland and Gould contacted their agents with the intent of getting "crazy" Altman fired. The studio treated MASH with the same contempt as Lardner, Jr. did, yet Altman got his way after a fashion and the film released is close to the version he intended and, indeed, rendered all but impossible to exist in any other form. Short of reshooting the entire thing and turning this modestly-budgeted picture into a moderately-budgeted one, 20th Century Fox's hand was forced, and the result is something that is arguably as influential to the burgeoning Seventies paranoia cinema as Bonnie & Clyde. Alinear, non-narrative, political, and a bold introduction of the man who was, along with Gene Hackman, the best actor of the best decade for American film (Sutherland, of course), MASH is brutal and sobering. If it's funny, it's only funny because it casts a delighted light on vital, ugly truths about men in tension and direct, physical, competition for status and women–MASH is In the Company of Men about the Vietnam War (Korean War setting be damned). It could be a primer for the apocalypse.
THE DVD
In addition to the AMC "Backstory" (24 mins.), the DVD includes a feature-length yakker from the man himself, Altman. Though never striking me as the raconteur, he offers insight and then lets the film unfold for minutes without comment; I can't say I minded and the track is ultimately indispensable. While I don't recall the sensation of seeing the film in pan-and-scan in previous home editions, my editor Bill offers that this THX-certified, 2.37:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation is a revelation. (Altman personally oversaw the transfer.) For my part, I can tell you that the video is free of artifacts and, aside from that distinct period patina I've grown to love like an old, trusted friend, it could have been made yesterday. The DD 2.0 audio, in stereo and mono incarnations, preserves the film's original mix just fine. MASH's theatrical trailer, also restored, and the standard stills gallery round out this single-disc distillation of Fox's previous Five Star Collection.
116 minutes; R; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Stereo), English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox
