Robert Altman’s 1970 M*A*S*H
If Robert Altman’s anti-war film M*A*S*H seems quaint now (I’m sure there’s a worse title for a film, but none comes to mind at the moment), it may have something to do with its time-weary notion that anyone who fights in a war is somehow noble, regardless of how anarchic they behave when not pointing a rifle at the enemy. Made at the height of the Vietnam War, Altman’s M*A*S*H hid his slapstick-cum-satire behind the skirts of lady time, placing his film in the relative safety of distance and historical perception regarding the Korean “conflict,” rather than the hysterical (and unfunny) picture of the Vietnam whatever-it-was. As far back in ancient cinematic history as Russian-born Lewis Milestone’s 1930 adaptation of German novelist Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front (now that’s what I call a title!), made in the mad wake of World War One, the cinema’s endorsement of military heroism as a form of moral self-justification, war movies have held an especially sacred place in liberal Hollywood’s canon of jingoistic jive it tries to pass off as moral introspection.
Milestone’s rejection as a candidate for the auteur Pantheon lies in his square-jawed, Eisensteinian commitment to montage as manipulation, rather than illumination. His calculated stylistic objectivity left no room for emotional subjectivity, which is, after all, the essence of the art of film. This strict adherence to the film techniques of Le Politique de Sergei Eisenstein eventually proved a millstone around Milestone’s creative neck. One of the casualties was the lack of visual irony in Western Front’s most famous scene when the German soldier (Lew Ayres, himself a real-life conscientious objector), kills a French soldier with a bayonet (Raymond Griffith) then asks for forgiveness over his dead body. There may be a time and place for cinematic objectivity; this wasn’t it.
For the rest of the ‘30s, the “war picture” remained relatively low in the moviegoing interest of the American public preoccupied with the Great Depression – forget about guns, how about some butter – until the onset of the Second World War. This geopolitical sequel, both offscreen and on, was welcomed with open arms. Much of the eagerness to return to battle was legitimately patriotic (boosted shamelessly by Washington’s directives to the Hollywood studios that they make what amounted to propaganda films to sell the righteousness of the war and the need to sell war bonds), even if the fervor was boosted at least in part by the end of the Depression and the workers’ returning to a munitions-producing economy.
Throughout the first half of the ‘40s, “war” pictures became one of, if not the most popular Hollywood genre, especially with the core audience of women whose husbands, sons, fathers, even sisters and mothers were off fighting on the far sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific. A superior director and legitimate war hero, John Ford was able to ground his battle scenes with a gravitas that allowed for a creeping gloom to counterbalance the celebratory glory in films like 1945’s They Were Expendable (that we saw earlier in this cycle). However, as the fighting faded and the rising sun signaled peace rather than war, and those nameless nurses in Times Square were smothered with kisses by love-starved sailors on VE Day (and a few months later VJ Day), doubt and debate gained a tentative foothold on what had been the euphoria of Western wartime movies.
One of the earliest and most effective expressions of this new ambivalence may be found in William Wyler’s brilliant, if bloodless, commentary on the high emotional cost of war. Wyler dramatized this through the plight of returning soldiers who’d been celebrated as sacraments of justice in battle (and onscreen), relegated in real life (and in Best Years) to the spigot status of peace-time soda jerks. (A major reason for the effectiveness of Wyler’s Oscar-winning Best Film of ‘45 was how he matched the ambivalence of his post-heroic characters with the ambiguousness of his long-take scenes, thereby leaving Milestone’s groundbreaking film in the dust of montage manipulation.) Throughout the suicidal, if peacetime years of HUAC and the subsequent blacklist, the uncertainty of where the world, as reflected by Hollywood, was headed was exacerbated by what the film biz was churning out in the tall shadow of the Committee – films that were timid rather than tumultuous, churlish rather than challenging, rational rather than rebellious. At least, that was what appeared on the surface of the screen. Beneath the shimmery obedience of the moguls, a moral mutiny was taking place in such films as Fred Zimmerman’s 1951 High Noon and his 1954 From Here to Eternity, in the hostile teenager nonconformity of Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel Without a Cause, a generational revolt led by cinema’s ultimate mythic mutineer, James Dean, intentionally clad in red jacket, white tee-shirt, and blue jeans. Hollywood’s next generation of actors, screenwriters and, especially, directors, provided the cinematic antidote to submission.
Fifteen years after Rebel, Altman’s neo-anachronistic M*A*S*H (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital), with a script by veteran screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., based on Richard Hooker’s 1968 MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, struck a major chord with audiences when it married military absurdity to mirthful madness. It redefined heroes as those who violate the standard notion of valor through hypocritical behavior while maintaining their standards of excellence and commitment to a higher authority, the Hippocratic oath. What was moral confusion and despair in Milestone’s Western Front (‘30s), homeland hypocrisy in Wyler’s Best Years (‘40s), the enemy within in Zinnemann’s Eternity (‘50s), and romanticized rebellion in Ray’s Rebel morphed into the hotbed of hysterics in Altman’s M*A*S*H,supercharged by the support of a counterculture built around the antiwar movement fuel-injected by the unfunny folly of Vietnam.
M*A*S*H proved Robert Altman’s career breakthrough, after he’d toiled for a number of years on small, mostly nondescript projects. The film won the prestigious Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival the year of its release and was nominated for Best Picture Oscar honors (it lost to Franklin Schaffner’s uber-jingoistic Patton). The anarchic style of shooting – vague and disruptive, with a choppy yet steady flow – came to be regarded as “Altmanesque,” films whose themes landed somewhere between anarchy with a vaguely leftish slant. The director became adept at running several parallel stories through his films, nerve endings without a central spine, a technique introduced into American film as early as D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation and his Intolerance a year later (two of the foundational pillars of Hollywood filmmaking). Among the most striking examples may be seen in his 1971 anti-corruption McCabe and Mrs. Miller (that we screened in an earlier cycle), 1975’s anti-corporate, paranoid Nashville, and 1992’s anti-Hollywood The Player. These films share distinctive, heavily stylistic storylines that are kinetically rather than literarily constructed, even as they suffer from a bit too much “Altmanitis.” That is to say, they feel more assembled than ensemble’d.
M*A*S*H is well worth seeing. It is not shown that often, having been eclipsed by the inferior TV series (although an endless war does fit the format of weekly episodes more than a single two-hour film). The chemistry between the two leads, an up-and-coming Donald Sutherland and Broadway actor Elliott Gould, is vibrant and perfectly pitched. This is a very different Donald Sutherland than the performance the actor gave as the Nazi spy in this cycle’s Eye of the Needle (Richard Marquand, 1981),itself a nod to the auteurist notion of how a director uses an actor rather than the other way around. As for Gould, although he never achieved above-the-title status, all the peculiarities of his persona and personality that were resisted by the Hollywood mainstream (too ethnic, too chubby, slight lisp, not handsome enough to be a leading man, not ugly enough to be a character actor) work quite well for him here.
-Marc Eliot
Resident Film Curator