Robert Altman’s MASH* is a funny, bloody war comedy worth seeing for its actors and its unruly sound. Its indulgence of the surgeons’ bullying makes some of the laughter difficult to share.
MASH* asks how people who spend their working hours cutting into wounded men can remain fit for ordinary company. Robert Altman’s answer is that they may not, and his surgeons’ jokes are often as nasty as they are funny. This is a good war comedy with a substantial blind spot: it grants its clever men more freedom to humiliate people than their circumstances can excuse. We recommend it for the performances and the hospital scenes, with reservations about whom it expects us to laugh at.
Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould do much of the persuading, playing Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre without pushing their lines towards a laugh. Their underplaying allows the vulgarity to sound like everyday conversation, which makes the doctors plausible company even when their behaviour is indefensible. Tom Skerritt helps keep the ensemble from becoming a contest to see who can seem most detached. The pleasure lies in hearing capable actors sound so thoroughly at home in this workplace.
Harold E. Stine’s zooms let us pick people out within the group, giving the ensemble room to work. Robert Altman’s overlapping dialogue is equally useful: nobody politely clears the soundtrack for the person with the important line. We have to listen across competing voices, and that makes the hospital feel busy even when its occupants are avoiding seriousness. This is where the film improves on the more orderly rhythms of a service comedy. The jokes benefit from arriving without an announcement.
The operating scenes are the reason the comedy has any weight. We were horrified by the surgical gore, particularly because the film gives it space beside the casual joking. Those scenes make the surgeons’ urge to behave badly comprehensible, and they stop the hospital becoming merely a convenient setting for pranks. Johnny Mandel’s music is welcome in a film so crowded with voices, although the talk supplies most of its comic rhythm. The men’s competence at work matters to how much of their behaviour we are prepared to tolerate.
That tolerance has limits, and Ring Lardner Jr.’s screenplay too often treats the surgeons’ amusement as sufficient reason for ours. The treatment of women is the clearest failure: their humiliation becomes an entertainment which the film does too little to question. Religious belief and military propriety also supply targets who rarely get a fair hearing. Nothing requires these men to be decent, but the film’s persistent admiration for them narrows its humour. We wanted it to look harder at the people obliged to put up with them.
Danford B. Greene’s editing keeps the separate episodes moving without forcing them into a tidy chain of causes and consequences. That suits a workplace in which the same tasks and evasions recur, although the film sometimes seems content simply to find another opportunity for misbehaviour. The raw surgery gives the comedy an urgency that some of the diversions cannot maintain. At 116 minutes, it has stretches where the freedom to wander begins to feel like an unwillingness to choose. Give it an evening if gallows humour is your preference, but expect to lose patience with the surgeons before their patients do.
