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180 comments in total

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42 out of 53 people found the following comment useful :-
A classic war-is-hell movie, 31 January 1999
Author: Bill Anderson (anderson@nehp.net) from New Hope, Alabama USA

No, not the very wonderful TV series. The Robert Altman film with Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye, Elliott Gould as Trapper John, and Radar as Radar. This is a dark comedy, but it's a delight from beginning to end. And even more effectively than the TV show, the movie illustrates the complete insanity of war. (But even the movie doesn't depict Jesus on the cross hanging from a helicopter. For that you'll need to read the book.) Like most Altman films, this one is episodic. It's also gritty, grim, bloody, offensive, and charming. And Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) is not a character watered down and humanized for television. This is an example of a film so rich in detail (like Altman's "Popeye," come to think of it) that it demands multiple viewings.

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34 out of 43 people found the following comment useful :-
One Of The Greatest Films Ever Made, 23 February 2006

Author: 2004RedSox

Some people may think I'm insane for saying this. But this is one of the greatest movies ever made. It was so shockingly different back in 1970 and it influenced war films in the 70s (the "war is insane"-type atmosphere of the film was used by "Apocalypse Now".) The black comedy elements are as original as Dr Strangelove. I have watched this film over ten times and I get astounded each time by it's amazing originality. It's too bad Robert Altman doesn't get as much as recognition as Kubrick or Fellini though I feel he is in the same league. Today the admirable but inferior TV series is more well-known than the movie but I feel the movie is one of the great achievements in film history.

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18 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
A Great War Comedy, 25 June 2003

Author: Michael P. Gallen (gallenm1@lasalle.edu) from Philadelphia, PA

This is truly the best military comedy ever made. It is funny, yet it realistically depicts the savagery of war and the non-chalance it gradually inspires in its victims. For example, some of the funniest, yet also most disturbing, moments in the film come when the doctors are operating on wounded soldiers, complete with gruesome sound effects, yet are discussing extremely trivial matters.

The film also benefits from some great performances. Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould were excellent as Hawkeye and Trapper John. They both had a streak of good movies during the 70s. Robert Duvall is amusing as a pious major whose fanaticism drives our heroes to extreme measures. Sally Kellerman and Tom Skerrit also put in good performances in their roles; it is a pity that these two actors are not better utilized nowadays.

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9 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Outrageous, in-your-face black humor, 22 August 2007
Author: Stanley Strangelove from Portland, Oregon US

M*A*S*H is a groundbreaking film. Along with Catch 22, M*A*S*H had the audacity to ridicule two of the pillars of American society: war and religion. Whether you find this appalling, subversive, treasonous, outrageous or funny depends on your political and religious orientation. Surely the religious right will find the film blasphemous and the political right will find it treasonous. No matter what your point of view, M*A*S*H is certainly an in-your-face film.

The irony of the film is that for the time it was considered gruesomely bloody. Yet there are no battlefield scenes; all the blood is in the surgical unit. The CSI TV series shows more carnage than M*A*S*H, but M*A*S*H was filmed over 30 years ago.

M*A*S*H is loaded with bizarro characters. Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Robert Duvall, Tom Skerrit, Loretta Swit, Radar are all insane in their own way. In "M*A*S*H," everyone is cruel, playing mean practical jokes and the anti-heroes Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould are just plain heartless. They absolutely torment Major "Hot Lips" Hoolihan and Robert Duvall. None of the characters in the film tries to be funny. There are no jokes. The humor just grows from the situation which is the grim reality of a mobile surgical unit whose doctors and nurses try their best to repair the horribly mutilated bodies from an insane war. Having worked in a hospital setting, outrageous and black humor is commonplace, especially in the ER, but in M*A*S*H it's taken to a new level.

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7 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
Pure Comedy Genius, 3 January 2006

Author: George Floyd (GF9) from London, England

As comedies go, it doesn't get much better than M*A*S*H! Script, direction, casting, music and acting are all at their very best in this satirical take on the Korean War - ironically, there is no army action played out during the movie, just the escapades of Elliot Gould, Donald Sutherland, et al where they are stationed to take in casualties of war.

From the opening shots we feel the slow mood of the film, yet if we look a little closer, we see comedy and havoc all around. This is in my opinion, Altman's finest piece - the film is superbly shot, showing fantastic long shots, typical of the era. Elliot Gould has never been so cool, and Donald Sutherland's dryness is sublime. The cast as a whole are the driving force behind this movie - the actor's clearly have taken time to learn their character's, and it really shows, right down to Radar's communication with the field Marshall (or whatever he is). It is very much a character driven movie.

The football game just shows what these people are really like - fun, scheming, lovable cheats - but it pays off because the opposition is so loathsome.

Beautifully written, shot, acted and the rest. Without a shadow of a doubt this is a 10 out of 10 and one of the best comedies around.

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13 out of 22 people found the following comment useful :-
Strange film, 28 December 2004

Author: kintopf432 (kintopf432@hotmail.com) from St. Paul, MN

Strange film; basically entertaining, but not exactly a masterpiece. One of the most likable things about Robert Altman is that every film of his has been in some way an experiment, and almost none of these experiments, even the very good ones, work perfectly. This is a great example. As is obvious from the many user comments here, it's difficult to talk about "MASH" without comparing it to "M*A*S*H," and in fact the most important cultural thing the film may have done is establish an aesthetic universe for the TV series to exist in (and that really is the only thing the film and the TV show have in common – as many have pointed out, the tone, style, timing, and even character personalities are quite different between the two). But taken on its own, "MASH" is not really the anti-war polemic it's been made out to be, nor is it the joke-driven movie comedy we might expect from the series' style. Instead, it's a kind of exercise in black-comic tone; it subverts the idea of war not by explicitly criticizing it, even through jokes, but rather by being exactly the opposite of what we expect a traditional war film to be. Here we don't see courage or valor or heroism or honor; we see cowardice and nastiness and vice and stupidity, even from the "good" characters. The movie subtly suggests that war makes ordinary people into silly, stupid, and vicious ones, and Hawkeye and Trapper are no more exempt from this law than Frank Burns; in fact, if anything they are more angry and mean than he is. This unusual approach to the subject matter is well-maintained throughout the film, and never becomes too harsh or ugly – and yet Altman missteps with some oddly chosen episodes (Painless's "suicide attempt," for instance, and the overlong, if symbolic, football game), and the ending of the film is abrupt, making what's come before seem even more pointless and inconsequential. Which may be exactly Altman's point, of course . . . so here we have another Altman film that manages to be simultaneously witty, jokeless, boring, entertaining, confusing, beautifully thought out, artfully constructed and artless, symbolic and realistic. It's recommended, but viewers should ideally go into it with no expectations whatsoever. 7 out of 10.

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Suicide Ain't Painless, 17 March 2009
Author: tieman64 from United Kingdom

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The "multi-character anti-narrative mosaic" was invented with "MASH". I've coined that ridiculous phrase myself, but how else do you describe what Altman's created here?

Let's examine the ingredients. Firstly, Altman constructs a self-contained environment. In "Gosford Park" it was a country house, in "The Company" it was a ballet school, in "Prairie Home Companion" it was a theatre and in "Short Cuts" it was nothing less than the city of Los Angeles. In "MASH" Altman constructs a mobile army field hospital, with functioning roads, helicopter landing pads, tents, barracks, mess halls and a make shift golf course.

His environment created, Altman then inserts his cast. But rather than give us a comfortable 3-act story, Altman has his characters interact, seemingly spontaneously, within his giant set. And so within this huge environment little mini narratives play out, the audience having to work hard to pick out the subtle character arcs and personality traits, Altman's camera floating back and forth, catching bits of dialogue and fragments of story. I've never seen any other director treat film quite this way.

This seemingly haphazard way of storytelling is further highlighted by Altman's love for overlapping dialogue, shapeless scripts and his willingness to let his casts improvise. Beyond this you then have the typical self-referential Altman layer. The act of preparing, improvising and putting on a performance is mirrored to the act of preparing, improvising and creating Altman's film. In "MASH" the "performance" takes the form of an operating theatre, football game, peep show and radio sex act. But such a self-referential layer is nothing new in Altman's filmography. "Nashville", "Buffalo Bill", "MASH", "Gosford Park", "Prairie Home Companion" etc, all revolve around large groups of people getting together and putting on a show.

What separates "MASH" from Altman's other films is how joyously rebellious it all is. Altman has always been a cynical filmmaker with a strong anti-establishment streak (one of his first films, a parody called "Pot au Feu", was a cooking show which presented the recipe for a cannabis joint), but never has he been this wacky and irreverent. Wounded soldiers are airlifted to the tune of "Suicide is painless", and the cast seems to go to great lengths to be as sexist, misogynistic, anti-religious, anti-establishment and gory as possible.

But it's the juxtaposition between the film's playful sense of anarchy and it's gory hospital scenes that is Altman's very point. These are characters so engulfed by the sorrowful madness of war that their only means of coping is to lose their minds in as controlled a way of possible. You might say that their antics are precisely how they cope with their environment; that war breeds chaos.

But just how anti-establishment is "MASH" and is it right to call it an "anti war" film? In an essay comparing "Full Metal Jacket" to "MASH", philosopher and film buff Slavoj Zizek deemed "MASH" Altman's most conformist film. For all their practical jokes, jabs at authority and sexual escapades, the MASH crew perform their duty with maverick-like efficiency. They are no threat to the smooth running of the military machine.

In other words, this very "detachment", the ability of MASH's cast to adopt a persona of cynicism, practical jokes and mockery- to view themselves as existing outside the system- is itself military ideology. As to give oneself completely over to ideology, to revoke one's Self in favour of a one dimensional military persona (Hot Lips) is itself a suicidal act, working ideology requires the subject to retain a kernel of individuality, whereby he views himself as being partially external or opposed to the system he inhabits.

While Altman prides himself on being the great deconstructor of genre, Zizek cites "Full Metal Jacket" as a deconstruction of Altman. Altman's sex acts and attacks on women and religion become the institutionalised acts of Kubrick's Sgt Hartman, religion upheld, femininity denigrated and sex transposed to violence. While Altman has one troop seek and then reject suicide as a cure for his sexual impotency, Kubrick flips this by having a young cadet embrace suicide as the logical outcome of his own sexual over-identification with the military. Altman's cast may get a slap on the wrist for toying with a Christian trooper, but when Pvt Joker denies the Virgin Mary, Kubrick is careful to counter violent punishment with a swift promotion. In Kubrick's world, the individual is nurtured by the very system that ultimately destroys him.

Significantly, the second part of Kubrick's film ends with a scene in which Joker, a character seemingly plucked straight out of "MASH", shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. Far from an outsider, Kubrick reveals Joker as the fully constituted military subject. In other words, an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it. By "joking", by seeing themselves as "opposed" to military ideology, the MASH boys are creating a human space that thwarts their own suicidal self destruction. And what is suicide but total identification; the giving of the Self totally to ideology.

Kubrick was a big Altman fan, and cast Mathew Modine in "Full Metal Jacket" based on his performance in Altman's military drama "Streamers". But what's interesting is that Kubrick's last war film is, on one level, a response to the ineffectual rebellion of something like "MASH". For all their antics, Altman's cast are simply school boys making noise in between lessons.

Interestingly, while Altman's film ends with an overlong football match, Kubrick filmed but then removed a sequence from "Full Metal Jacket" in which his marines play football with a sniper's decapitated head.

8/10 – Though it's more a carnival show than a comment on war, "MASH" is still lots of fun. The film's irreverence has lost some of its bite (1st major film to use the F word), but should nevertheless appeal to those with a macabre sense of humour.

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5 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Less Good As Time Goes By, 23 April 2007

Author: jeremy3 from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Although this movie attempts to be exciting and humorous, the humor is disconnected with reality. Altman wanted to make a statement about war without really understanding what it was really like to be in a combat situation in Korea. The surgery scenes are gruesome, yet they don't seem real enough. There is no sense of connection in the operating room with the pain of war. There are no artillery shells. They even have lots of time for horsing around and playing football. Basically, it is "good guys" versus "bad guys". The "bad guys" are Major Houlihan and Major Burns. Both Kellerman and Duvall are very good in their roles. Sutherland is pretty decent, but poorly developed. You get the sense that he likes dogs and is pretty decent, but he comes of as a complete pain-in-the-neck. Gould is disappointing. He comes across as a hippie, not as someone who really existed in the 1950s. Basically, there were amusing moments, such as the football game, but I never felt that this movie was anything more than an ego trip for Altman. I never felt that it was an honest look at the Korean War.

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23 out of 43 people found the following comment useful :-
Vastly Over-Rated, 20 January 2003

Author: sddavis63 (revsdd@gmail.com) from Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada

I realize that this movie has achieved almost cult status and is widely regarded as a classic, but it just didn't work for me. The best thing I can say about it is that it gave birth to the long running television series of the same name, which may still be the best television series ever made. But how anyone could watch this movie and get the idea to make it into a television series is beyond me.

I readily confess, of course, that (as with almost everyone born in the 1960's or later) my introduction to and conception of MASH is the TV series. It's truly difficult for me to relate to Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye Pierce, for example. Not that he, or any of the actors, did a bad job. It's just that the TV series is so ingrained in my mind that it's hard to see different actors putting their unique spins on familiar characters. Hawkeye, Trapper John (Elliott Gould), Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), Hot Lips Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and Col. Blake (Roger Bowen) are portrayed very differently than their TV counter-parts. That's fine (and the actors did well) but it's still disconcerting.

The problems I felt with this movie went far beyond the difficulties involved with relating to an unfamiliar cast playing familiar characters, though. The story focuses on the experiences of Captains Pierce and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt) at the 4077 MASH in the Korean War. It opens with their arrival and closes with their discharge. But to me the movie lacks any clear focus or consistency. It doesn't seem to be building to anything and in the end it just fizzles out quietly without any real climax. The zany antics of the doctors come across here as mean-spirited more than fun, and there's way too much emphasis on the football game between the 4077 and the 325th Evac. I mean - who really cares? To me, this movie didn't even seem to have a strong anti-war message. Anti-military perhaps, but not anti-war (and the two are not the same thing, in my opinion.)

I realize that I'm not in tune here with most people's thinking, but as far as I'm concerned the best thing about this movie is actually hearing the words to the familiar MASH theme: "Suicide Is Painless." I also appreciated the fact that, this being a motion picture rather than a TV series, the horrors of war (ie, the wounds of the soldiers) could be more graphically (and therefore more soberingly) portrayed. Aside from that, nothing much here appealed to me.

2/10

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
A disgusting film, 17 January 2009
Author: pettrichor from Canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Though MASH has many gory scenes, its values are what make this film really horrifying. Primarily for the crime of being religious, Frank Burns is humiliated and then provoked into hitting Hawkeye for which he is unjustly hauled off by the MPs. Never mind that Hawkeye is guilty of the same hypocrisy as Frank, or that when Trapper punches Frank, his punishment is no more than having his promotion delayed a week.

Even more appalling is the deliberate humiliation of Margaret by exposing her to the entire camp while in shower -- all to settle a bet about the colour of her pubic hair. When Margaret begs the Colonel to intervene, he suggests she resigns.

When a colleague believes he is gay, he is made a source of ridicule until he is cured of what the film sees as a psychological illness. The cure? Hawkeye railroads a nurse into sleeping with him.

Hawkeye and Trapper use every trick of intimidation, especially threats of violence (as when they frighten an African American nurse away from her post) to pursue their empty hedonistic whims -- and we are somehow meant to think it is all charming.

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