![]() |
Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt and Donald Sutherland are three madcap surgeons in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H a film that looks less screwball and more misogynist every day |
Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Donald Sutherland (Captain “Hawkeye” Pierce), Elliott
Gould (Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre), Tom Skerritt (Captain “Duke” Bedford),
Sally Kellerman (Major Margaret Hoolihan), Robert Duvall (Major Frank Burns),
Roger Bowen (Lt Col Henry Blake), Rene Auberjonois (Father Mulcahy), David
Arkin (SSgt Wade Vollmer), Jo Ann Pflug (Lt Maria “Dish” Schneider), Jon Schuck
(Captain “The Painless Pole” Waldowski), Carl Gottlieb (Captain “Ugly John”
Black)
Robert Altman’s counter-culture M*A*S*H was his first (and probably only) unreserved smash hit, the
film where Altman cemented his style as a director. Although set in the Korean
War, the film was clearly more about attitudes towards Vietnam. Today M*A*S*H is probably more well known as
the filmic spring board for the extremely long-running TV show starring Alan
Alda (which, at 11 years, lasted seven years longer than the war it was set
in).
M*A*S*H (like the
series) covers the mad-cap antics of the doctors at the 4077th
medicine outpost near the frontlines of the Korean war, a casualty clearing
station where young men are patched up and either sent back to the front line
or sent home. While the base is a military operation, most of the doctors
serving there are drafted civilian doctors rankled by rigid military discipline.
The leaders of this prickly bunch are “Hawkeye” Pierce (Donald Sutherland),
“Trapper” John (Elliot Gould) and “Duke” Bedford (Tom Skerritt), with their
targets ranging from generals to the stiff-backed military figures on the base,
specifically the officious but less-competent surgeon Frank Burns (Robert
Duvall) and Head Nurse Major Hollihan (Sally Kellerman).
M*A*S*H is the
first expression of what became Robert Altman’s signature style as a director.
The film has a grimy immediacy that throws the audience into the middle of the
action, and is cut with an edgy lack of artifice that at the time was seen as
barely competent film-making. That didn’t outrage people as much as Altman’s
willingness to allow a lack of conventional discipline in dialogue delivery,
with actors overlapping wildly, some dialogue drifting out of earshot or not
being captured on screen, no real story being developed through it. It’s a
deliberately scrappy, scratchy, almost clumsy film shot with a great deal of
artistic discipline (including a spot on The
Last Supper parody) but cut and sound-edited with a casual precision that
makes it feel extraordinarily experimental.
It infuriated its screenwriter Ring Lardner Jnr (no doubt
the Oscar that he received soothed his pain), and Altman’s loose,
improvisational style and unwillingness to go for conventional framing and
style also alienated his leading actors. Altman and Sutherland (with Gould’s
support) each pushed for the other to be dismissed from the film (Sutherland has
claimed to have never seen the film, and ton have never understood its success;
Gould later apologised by letter to Altman and worked with him several times
again) and the whole film’s final style – its influential fly-on-the-wall vibe
and nose-thumbing lack of formal discipline – can be attributed completely to
Altman’s vision and artistic independence.
The film is important as a key landmark in film-making style
and in Altman’s development as a director – but there is no other way of saying
it, it has dated extraordinarily badly. For those more familiar with the TV
show, its tone is going to come as quite a shock. The TV show is a lighter,
sillier, more socially conscious creation (increasingly so in its later years)
where the tone was more japery and deadpan silliness. The film is cruel, and
its lead characters are swaggering, alpha jocks and bullies, whose meanness and
astonishing levels of misogyny are constantly celebrated and rewarded. For
those who remember Alan Alda as Hawkeye, Donald Sutherland’s viciousness is
coming to come as quite a shock!
Hawkeye and Trapper John’s vileness at frequent intervals is
pretty hard to stomach (the less said about the racist, unpleasant Duke the
better). The film is really keen to show that all this rampant cruel practical
jokery is a survival mechanism against the horrors of war, and the difficulty
of dealing with patching young soldiers up to send them back out to die. But
the film never really gives us a sense of the war, and the surgery scenes
(while effective in their bloodiness and counterpointing the frat house
atmosphere of the rest of the film) fail to create that ominous sense of senseless
never-ending conflict that the film needs to balance out the vileness of the
humour. Further, while Hawkeye and Trapper John are both shown to be dedicated
and gifted professionals, they also remain two-dimensional figures, never
really shown to have an emotional hinterland that expands their work. They are
instead more like Wall Street stockbrokers: excellent at their job, but still a
pair of arseholes.
Their attitude to women – and the film’s attitude – is
beyond troubling today, it’s flat out offensive. The nurses on station are
treated as no more than snacks for the men to enjoy, that they are entitled to
pick up as often as they like, and who are barely given any character at all.
Sex is as much an entitlement as rations. On his promotion to Chief Surgeon,
Trapper John demands (half-jokingly) sex, while Hawkeye “volunteers” a woman to
help “cure” another character who fears he has turned homosexual and is
considering suicide. Counter culture against the war is celebrated throughout –
but it shown in this film to be overwhelmingly a masculine campaign, in which
women have no place and no equality. Men can feel the war is terrible, and men
can rebel against authority, but women exist only to service their needs.
All of this boils down into a real bad taste in the film’s
treatment of ultra-professional Major Hoolihan. Reviled by Hawkeye, Trapper
John and Duke for the twin crimes of taking her military career seriously and
not being interested in sex with Hawkeye, Hoolihan is systematically degraded
and humiliated throughout the film. From having her sex with humourless prig
and fellow disciplinarian Frank Burns broadcast around the camp (giving her the
nickname “Hot Lips” from her pillowtalk, a title she never escapes) to having
the shower tent collapsed around her in front of the whole camp to settle a bet
about whether she is a “real blonde” or not – her reaction to which we are
misogynistically encouraged to view as hysteria, as dismissed by her commanding
officer – it’s tough to watch. The one compliment she gets in the film on being
a good nurse is accompanied by her insulting nickname, and by the end of the
film she has been reduced to being depicted as an air-headed cheerleader at a
football game. Even her credits picture shows her ultimate moment of
humiliation. She’s seen as a Blue Stocking, unnatural because she is attractive
but not willing to be sexually available to men. This is the sort of treatment
that could drive a person to suicide, here treated for laughs. It’s impossible
to watch with a smile today.
And it’s the dated part of the film as Hawkeye and Trapper
are never questioned for this behaviour – indeed they are celebrated and
encouraged throughout as fun, cool guys – when in fact they are the worst sort
of jock bullies and their antics the sort of tedious frathouse rubbish that
blights too many all-male clubs. They are working class Bullingdon boys, who
value nothing, with the film giving them passes because they are great
surgeons. Sutherland in particular isn’t charming, he’s creepy and unsettlingly
cruel, while Gould at least has a madcap goofiness with touches of humanity.
Two hours with these arseholes is a long time, and the film
just plain isn’t funny enough for what it is trying to do – neither does it
convey the horrors of war enough, or the men’s understanding of it. More time
shown on the surgeons at least acknowledging the horrors might have helped
wonders – but the film assumes that we know what they are feeling and just
rolls with it. You could generously say they are cruel in a cruel world. But
the film never acknowledges the essential meanness of the humour here, and
tries to involve us all in it with no sense of conflict or concern. It’s a
troubling film to watch today, its rampant sexist cruelty is offensive and its
lack of charm purely unintentional. Time will continue to be cruel to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.