With the United States deeply divided over the Vietnam War and antiwar sentiment especially high among college and university students, the motion picture M*A*S*H, an irreverent dark comedy set in the Korean War but evoking the war in Vietnam, lampooned military protocol and accentuated the horrors of war. The film was a huge commercial and critical success and inspired an award-winning television series that ran for eleven seasons.
By the fall of 1970, the Vietnam War
In the middle of this climate, Twentieth Century-Fox
Most of the cast was made up of newcomers to the screen, and even the principals, though established actors, were largely unknown. The film’s top billing went to Donald Sutherland, a character actor primarily known for a small but memorable role in the film The Dirty Dozen. The other two leads, Elliott Gould and Tom Skerritt, were even less recognizable. Gould had made only four movies over the previous six years, most notably Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Skerritt’s work had been almost exclusively in television. The film’s most prominent female role went to Sally Kellerman, who was, like Skerritt, working primarily in television. Robert Duvall had the most experience in feature films, including a well-received performance as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Billed as a comedy, the film’s episodic humor was tempered by frequent scenes in bloody operating rooms and by a mean-spirited quality to many of the jokes, often seeking laughs at the expense of women, religion, and minority characters. The film opens with the arrival in Korea of two new surgeons, Hawkeye Pierce and Duke Forrest, who quickly establish their disdain for military protocol by stealing a jeep, making passes at the nurses, and mixing martinis in their quarters. When they discover that the surgeon with whom they share a tent, Frank Burns, is devoutly religious (though later revealed to be hypocritical in his beliefs), they demand that he be moved out of their tent and eventually engineer his removal from the camp in a straitjacket. The arrival of a third iconoclastic surgeon, Trapper John McIntyre, and a rigidly bureaucratic head nurse, Margaret O’Houlihan, draws the battle lines between military protocol and cavalier irreverence even more sharply. O’Houlihan acquires the nickname “Hot Lips” after the surgeons eavesdrop on, and broadcast to the entire camp, an amorous episode with Burns, and is later exposed to the entire camp while showering to settle a bet among the surgeons.
Most of the other episodic storylines are no less irreverent. When the camp dentist contemplates suicide because of fears of sexual impotency, the surgeons create a parody of the Last Supper culminating not in the dentist’s death, but in his seduction by one of the nurses, a suggestively nicknamed Lieutenant Dish. When Pierce and McIntyre are sent to Tokyo to perform surgery on a congressman’s son, they visit geisha houses, play golf, and put an anesthetized colonel into a compromising situation. Later, when the 4077th is challenged to a football game by another outfit, they recruit a former football star, an African American surgeon with the nickname “Spearchucker,” to help them engineer a victory.
Executives at Twentieth Century-Fox were horrified by the chaotic results. They were especially concerned that, since the movie made no mention of being set in Korea, audiences would assume the setting was Vietnam and be offended by a perceived criticism of the war America was fighting at the time. To ease the concern, Altman added a prologue with explicit references to Korea, as well as adding to the movie a series of 1950’s-style announcements to the camp over a public address system. Lardner too was concerned about the movie’s mayhem. He felt his script had been distorted by Altman’s unstructured direction and the improvised dialogue, but the results proved effective nonetheless. Lardner won the Academy Award
Most of the audience recognized M*A*S*H’s implicit allusions to the Vietnam War, so the younger generation embraced the movie as an antiwar vehicle. On the other hand, the absence of any explicit political message led older viewers to see the film as the sort of parody of military bureaucracy that had been part of American culture for decades. This widespread appeal led M*A*S*H to become the third highest grossing film of 1970, earning more than $30 million (a large sum in 1970’s dollars) in the first year following its release. The film also enjoyed high praise from critics. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe Award
Two years after its release, the film inspired a television series by the same name. Originally a zany comedy but later exploring more serious themes, the series ran for eleven seasons and won fourteen Emmy Awards. Its final episode in 1983 remains as the most watched episode in television broadcast history, garnering about 70 percent of the night’s viewership, an audience of 125 million.
The film proved to be a springboard to fame for Altman, who earned an Oscar nomination for M*A*S*H and went on to direct a number of highly acclaimed films, including Nashville, The Player, and Gosford Park. Among the actors, Duvall and Sutherland enjoyed especially successful careers following M*A*S*H. Duvall later won a Best Actor Oscar for Tender Mercies, one of six nominations across his career.
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Apel, Otto F., Jr., and Pat Apel. MASH: An Army Surgeon in Korea. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998. An account of the workings of a Korean War Mobile Army Surgical Hospital by the unit’s chief surgeon. The autobiographical work emphasizes many of the same themes as Richard Hooker’s novel, including the irreverent attitudes of the medical staff toward army protocol and the brutal conditions under which they worked. -
Hooker, Richard. M*A*S*H: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. New York: William Morrow, 1968. The episodic and stylistically inconsistent, though nonetheless humorous, novel on which Lardner’s screenplay was based. -
Self, Robert T. Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. An insightful examination of Altman’s films, his idiosyncratic filmmaking style, and his subtle commentaries on human nature and society. -
Sterritt, David, ed. Robert Altman: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. A compilation of seven interviews, some of them quite extensive, conducted by seven different journalists (or pairs of journalists) with the director of M*A*S*H.
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