M*A*S*H (1970, Robert Altman)

The movie, not the TV-show. It was a smash hit in theatres when I was a teenager and we all went to see it, even when we didn't have the right age (it had an '18 rating'). Today, half a century later, it's still an entertaining movie, but it's hard to understand why an entire generation went raving mad about it.

MASH is set during the Korean war (1950-1953), but the subtext is the war in Vietnam. The raunchy jokes, the haircuts and moustaches are all Sixties, not Fifties. Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould are Hawkeye and Trapper John, surgeons in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (hence the title). They are not passionate about the war, but dedicated to saving people's lives. They reject protocol and view those who respect it with cold contempt. Sutherland and Gould look and behave like hippies and the growing protests against the Vietnam War must have helped the movie a lot: it was interpreted as a protest to America's military operations in the Far East. Mash was anti-establishment, Mash was counterculture, Mash was ahead of its time. At least we thought it was all these things. 

The movie is a collection of vignettes, with hardly any coherent narrative. Director Robert Altman realized his episodic movie needed more structure and therefore added a series of speaker announcements to connect the different episodes. Those announcements are occasionally funny, but don't really solve the problem: the whole thing still feels rather disjointed.

As said, Mash is still enjoyable, the episodic action has a nice flow and the actors are very good. Sutherland and Gould underplay their roles, which suits the material very well, and Sally Kellerman is a delight as Major Margaret 'Hotlips' Houlihan, the straitlaced, yet lascivious nurse who is the obvious target of many of the boys' practical jokes. But there's this feeling that it belongs to another era. Above all, it's not as funny as it used to be. Mash was an immensely popular movie and the raunchy jokes - like Hotlip's infamous shower scene - seem to have influenced directors of sex comedies, a popular subgenres from the first half of the Seventies. What used to be daring and outrageously funny may now give you the idea that you're watching one the entries in the long running Porky's series.

⭐⭐⭐½

1970 - Dir: Robert Altman - Cast: Donald Sutherland (Hawkeye), Elliot Gould (Trapper John), Sally Kellerman (Hotlips), Tom Skerritt (Duke), Robert Duvall (Major Burns), Roger Bowen (Lt.-Col. Blake), Jo Ann Pflug (Dish), Gary Burghoff (Radar)