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.

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.

almost all references to Korea except for the street signs in the town, which were in Korean . But the scenes of wounded soldiers had the effect, for me, of making it clear how important the work was that the surgeons were doing, compared to the trivialities of military life, thus justifying their antics and making them seem like good guys after all.

occupies most of the last moments of the film. Before this, the film kept getting better and better as it went on. Then, with the football game, it hit an insurmountable wall. The one thing this film did not need was a sports finale. Everything seems to depend on the game, even though absolutely nothing does depend on it. I was interested in the characters, and during the game, I couldn't even tell which one was which. Therefore, I could have cared less about what was happening here. I became terribly bored, almost to the point of fast forwarding through this sequence. To boot, Hot Lips becomes insufferably annoying and uncharacteristically bimbonic as she dresses up as a cheerleader. We were told in a previous scene that Hot Lips rebuked the others for playing football, so it seemed unlikely to me that she would turn into a cheerleader.I was praying that the film would not end at the end of the game, and luckily, it didn't. It does have a rather classy ending, as I would expect from Altman. The credit sequence is very unique, kind of like the end of Welles' Magnificent Ambersons or Altman's own opening credits for his greatest masterpiece, Nashville. I still give MASH a 9/10, but it should have been a 10/10, because it was going that way the entire picture.

movie in Britain in 1970 and can remember the section where Hawkeye spoke to a TV camera about life in war torn Korea, and remember his speech being a bit longer. It may have been cut during the US version as there were sensitivities due to the war in Vietnam. Having stated this it was an excellent film and was far superior to the consequential TV series.

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.

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. In a sense, it's up to the audience to synthesize the story and turn it into a cohesive "whole".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. And beyond this you then have the typical self-referential Altman layer, in which the act of preparing, improvising and putting on a performance is mirrored to the act of preparing, improvising and creating Altman's film. Almost all of Altman's films revolve around large groups of people getting together and putting on a show. In "MASH" this "performance within a performance" takes the form of an operating theatre, football game, peep show and radio sex act .But what separates "MASH" from Altman's other films is how joyously rebellious it all is. Altman has always been a 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 in one neat scene at a table, they strike the pose of Da Vinci's Last Supper , anti-establishment and gory as possible.But it's the juxtaposition between the film's playful sense of anarchy and its gory hospital scenes that is Altman's very point. These are characters so engulfed by the 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.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 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 modern ideology. As to give oneself completely over to ideology, to revoke one's Self in favour of a one dimensional military persona Hot Lips, Pvt Pyle is itself a suicidal act, working ideology requires the subject to retain a kernel of individuality, whereby he views himself as being 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. 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 its an anti "anti war film" film is, on one level, a response to the ineffectual rebellion of something like "MASH" or "Catch 22". 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.

flop it would have been pulped and made in another failed novel, while a failed film carries a lot more risk. An indication that Hollywood still has its worthy moments.As the stars are not in any great physical danger, the war seems to be viewed in abstract. A background detail that gets in the way of drinking, women chasing and deflating of egos. While this is a message picture the message is not pushed down your throats, indeed it plays out like a prison picture where the male prisoners have access to the luxuries of life, but cannot escape the barracks and the barbed wire.The film took Gould and Sutherland up a notch, and they work together well because they are a team. You can imagine one of them starting a sentence and other finishing it. By deed of being surgeons they can buck authority what can they do to them - send them home? , but that point is weakened by authority never being portrayed as overbearing or over competent. Certainly it is sexist and more so as the years pass by. The humiliation of women they don't like being by far the most objectionable. "Get me a nurse who won't get her tits in the way," barks Gould at one point. While not a expert on surgical procedure I seem to detect on TV documentaries that it is team work with everyone having a role and the respect of the others. Here women are instrument passers and brow-moppers rather than respected team players.The TV series that followed became an institution and, as I have said before, will never allow the film to be viewed in the same way again. The series allowed a certain amount of soap opera and repeating themes. Comforting tools that blunts the central message. The main thing that follows from the movie is that the male stars must always have the last laugh or come out on top. The main flaw in the movie is that it has nowhere to go and nothing to climax on. Naturally the war could end and they could all go home, but maybe that would have been a cop out? In the end they came up with a comic football game, which is as abstract to the central theme of the movie as anybody could get. For an important ground breaking film to have such a device seems almost disrespectful, but the more I think about it the more I can't help thinking that they couldn't do any better. Nothing would fit. A quiet anti-climax, but it is a quiet anti-war film.