MASH

Altman is my favorite director of all time. Unfortunately given my age I did not get to experience a lot of his films in the theaters. Of all of his films I most regret not being able to see in their first run this wonderfully angry, biting and above all funny satire is at the top of the list. It looks utterly different from most films. The use of fog filters on the cameras as well as Altman's use of zooms, and the way he clutters up the shots give the film a raw unpolished look. The movie is not pleasing to the eye on first pass but it has a lived-in, stressed look that just utterly fits. It fits in with how the film is turning the war genre instead out. It makes everything funnier. And it makes the film the least celebratory war film in the American canon.

The story is quite unconventional; Altman would take this farther in later films but it doesn't really have a 3 act structure and the various plot threads are frayed and left hanging. At best you can say the film follows Haweye's deployment from beginning to end-but the each episode is such just another day that much of the film can be re-ordered and the underlying plot doesn't change that much. It is basically like being plopped down into middle of a collection of lives and you see various petty dramas play out. Some of them resolve, some of them only start, some you don't know the beginning of. Yet for all that the film has a complete feel to it given that underneath all the seeming freewheeling it has prerequisites of a story. The use of the football game as the climax is a brilliant stroke. It works to bring into focus was the film is about and it ruthlessly mocks the war genre. The sarcasm of players going down like fallen soldiers cannot be missed and it says something about both football-Americana gladiatorial sport-and war.

The film is quite angry at the Vietnam war. As a protest the use of humor mixed in with the (for the time) realistic and gory surgical scenes is a correctly didactic way of being anti-war. There is no scared cows in this film and pretty much everything gets hit. Rather cleverly several classic war films are named over the PA system to mock them as propaganda. Onward Christian Soldiers gets re-purposed for irony (Through with so many characters a lot of things are treated along a spectrum. The film is far fonder of Diego than Frank Burns for example). Today, there is a mean spirited streak of misogyny to the film that some might find off putting as a result of this approach. Poor Hot Lips seems to get punched much more than Frank does.

I re-watched this for the nth time today and enough cannot be said about the overall editing style of the film. The irrelevant and bawdy scenes are almost always sandwiched between surgical scenes (if not more serious scene such as Ho-Jon getting drafted). It drives the point home-again and again-that the characters are using gallows humor in order to survive. There is no film more perfectly its central character as this one. Hawkeye is a guy who is just trying to stay sane in the best way he can and like the film he bounces back and forth between irrelevancy and anger. I am not entirely sure how Sutherland was ignored on the awards circuit given the film.

This film launched Altman's career. It is also among his best and most accessible.