I heard a rumor there was a TV series with the same name but...

Rating: 10/10 (29 May 2005)

Of all the movies of the 1960s, this by far is my favorite. A perfect example of a movie scrript that is so much better than the book. (Read it at your own peril. It is deadly dull and understandable why it was refused by so many publishers.)
I was in Vietnam when this movie was released and the military almost stopped it from being shown in military theaters, but fortunately, we had a decent Supreme Court then and it survived the ordeal. Thank God, because this is a movie classic that was really about Vietnam when no one was allowed to make movies about Vietnam. Unlike the TV counterpart, this MASH was as cynical as it should have been, and the characters were real with incredibly memorable lines like that spoken by Margaret "Hotlips": Houlihan, "I wonder how a degenerate like that ever reached a responsible position in the Army's medical corps?" to which Father "Dago Red" Mulcahy replied "He was drafted." Korea like Vietnam was a war in which the U.S. meddled in what was essentially a civil war, and in that they were the same more or less, but this movie's war was no different in the respect of the way the Army looked at their own soldiers. It's okay to send them off to be ripped apart by bullets so long as they had the medical staff to patch them up and send them back to the front lines. Naturally, the men would be cynical and hard-bitten.
And while the military would not have allowed the long hair and Fu Manchu mustache of an Ellitt Gould, the film, I believe, makes the point that young people of that time were as much soldiers as any in combat. It also I think was done this way as a wink and a nod to this really being a movie about Vietnam. For me, Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould will forever be THE Hawkeye and Trapper John. (It's also interesting that Pernell Roberts when playing "Trapper John, M.D." looked more like an older Elliot Gould than an older Wayne Rogers. I wonder if that TV exec or producer preferred the movie to the TV show.) I must have seen this film about a dozen times when it hit Tan Son Nhut AB RVN and refused to see Patton when it played at first, because I knew that IT was put there to counteract the anti-war sentiment of MASH. Which is also interesting to note that the author of the book didn't like the anti-war sentiment of either the film or the TV show, though I don't believe he ever sent back a single royalty check.
I resented the softening of the Radar O'Reilly character on the TV show even though the same actor played the part both times. I STILL do. I liked the innocent looking yet, wickedly playful Radar of this film. Damn his grape Nehis.
This is not to say I hate the TV show. I just wish the producers had sold the actors as different characters in the same MASH unit. Then it would work for me. I will admit to loving Colonel Potter but hating the insipid character of Cpl. Klinger.
After all, "This isn't a hospital. It's an insane asylum." I couldn't agree with you more, Major O'Houlihan. War is Hell and insane. and this movie proves it while showing the military with all of its lack of compassion for the very soldiers it sends to fight them or patch them up. God forbid they should see a movie that tells it like it is.
MASH rules, and anyone who does not see it as a great movie either never lived through the 60s, or just doesn't get it. War is not supposed to be fuzzy and warm with a laugh track. And there are so many elements of the film that gave it far more edge than any TV show would have allowed.
The best thing Altman has ever done and I don't think he will ever top it.