"MASH" Revives the Irreverence of the Era

Several times in the past few weeks I’ve gone down to Marin County, both as guest editor of the San Rafael Patch and for other reasons as well. In the process, I’ve rediscovered what should not have been lost, the great resource that is the California Film Institute and its home, the .

Just this weekend we came in from the rain to watch a special screening of MASH, the 1970 anti-war comedy directed by Robert Altman. On hand were star Elliott Gould and local progressive and anti-war activist Norman Solomon (whom I had interviewed a few days earlier about his “”).

While the success of the long-lived television series “M*A*S*H” (the asterisks distinguish the TV show from the movie) has somewhat eclipsed the movie in popular memory, seeing the original again reinforces the audacious, ground-breaking impact that the film had on 1970 audiences.

To call the movie “irreverent” is to diminish the movie to the status of “South Park” or The Hangover. It is at once wide-eyed and cynical, shocking and hilarious, as few films of even that celebrated decade were – a decade that gave us The Godfather and Apocalypse Now from Coppola, Jaws and Close Encounters from Spielberg, Taxi Driver and Mean Streets from Scorsese, and the first two Star Wars movies from George Lucas.

But the decade was launched, and some might say had its finest moments, in the work of Robert Altman. His earlier films had been largely overlooked or unsuccessful, and he had been fired from several projects. No one expected anything of MASH  -- the studio was focusing on potential blockbusters like Tora! Tora! Tora! and ignoring low-budget films like MASH and Planet of the Apes, filming at the same time on the same back lot, as Elliott Gould told the audience following the screening.

Independent films were becoming mainstream, in a trend kicked off by Easy Rider a year earlier. But it could be argued that MASH sealed the deal – not only for Hollywood, but for Altman.

The big budget war satire that year was supposed to be Catch 22, directed by Mike Nichols, with a script by Buck Henry from Joseph Heller’s novel, but MASH stole its thunder. Plain and simple, it was funnier, more satiric, more entertaining, lighter on its feet and more successful.

Much of the credit goes to Altman, an instinctively creative filmmaker whose use of overlapping dialog, on-screen improvisation, disjoined narrative, wry and blue comedy, and a restless camera perfectly suited the post-60s audience. Personally, I remember clearly seeing only two movies from that period that I felt at the time changed my idea of what films, and art, were: Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and MASH.

Although stars Gould and Donald Sutherland (whose Hawkeye Pierce persona was appropriated by Alan Alda in the TV show) were unhappy with Altman’s undisciplined control of the filming, and worked behind-the-scenes to have him fired, the movie’s success changed Gould’s mind about Altman. He worked with him on several other key movies in both their careers, at least one of which, The Long Goodbye from a Raymond Chandler novel, sometimes shows up on Best of Hollywood lists.

To today’s viewer, at least this viewer, The Long Goodbye (1973) does not age well (though I loved it in 1973), and Gould’s shambling performance bears a large share of the blame. On the other hand, the Gould-George Segal pairing on California Split (1974) is perfect, rivaling the Gould-Sutherland match-up in the milieu of compulsive gambling.

Between MASH and Nashville, Altman’s 1975 Oscar-nominated piece de resistance, you’ll find the best of ‘70s film, and Altman. Brewster McCloud, a fantasy with Bud Cort (introduced in MASH); McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the tragic-comic Western with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie; the dark fantasy of Images with Susannah York; Thieves Like Us, a 30’s lovers-on-the-lam film noir with Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall; added to The Long Goodbye and California Split they create a body of work that remains as idiosyncratic and astonishing today as it seemed then.

These films were great, it was brought home at the recent screening, because they were revolutionary when revolution was called for. Nixon was in the White House, manipulating the press, spying on rivals and government disinformation to aggrandize his power; and we were in an unpopular war we could not win, in Viet Nam. The presence of the progressive Solomon and the actor Gould, who was on had to endorse the anti-war activist in his congressional race, brought the message of MASH into the present day.

Although MASH was officially set in Korea, it was clearly a movie about Vietnam, and its irreverence a slap in the face to the uptight officiousness of the powers-that-be. Primarily the military and its chain of command, of course, but also fundamentalist religiosity, in the person of the lunatic Robert Duvall, goaded to his limit and beyond by Sutherland. Patriotism doesn’t fare too well, either, racism is given a tweak or two, in fact authority in any guise is roundly ridiculed.

While a question from the audience criticized the movie for its treatment of women – perhaps a valid point, but one which is more a critique of the time than the film – it’s worth taking a step back.

After all, in the same movie, a black football player is nicknamed “Spearchucker,” a soldier who fails to achieve an erection fears he’s really a “fairy,” and he attempts suicide in a community-endorsed act that bears an outrageously sacrilegious evocation of the Last Supper.

These are not “politically correct” by any stretch of the imagination. But if you’re irreverent, that’s what you are. And if there's one thing that MASH is, it's a classic of irreverence.

Make that two things: a classic of American film.