Vietnam Attitude in a Korea Setting

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 1999)

Brutal humor, if you can take the smugness. The "Oscar" people couldn't; they gave the Best Picture Award to "Patton," although "MASH" won for Best Adapted Screenplay. Evidently, even the Academy was a battleground for the "Generation Gap" (remember that one?)
"MASH" sets the tone for irreverence early by first shooting at the biggest sacred cow of all: religion. Hawkeye and Duke mock Frank Burns for his arrogant, outwardly-sincere-but-inwardly-fascist religious beliefs. Does Frank forgive them? Just look in his eyes: he hates them. A cinematic first: never before was dress-yourself-up-and-get-down-on-your-knees White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant American Christianity so undressed.
"MASH" doesn't pull punches, not with the humor and not when they're operating on the war's wounded - gore galore. They may be clowns outside but inside they're "the Pros from Dover." And here institutional religion takes another, if lighter, touch: Duke calls Army chaplain Father Mulcahy from giving the Last Rites to a dead patient to help save a still-living one. Frank Burns is a fraud, Father Mulcahy is genuine but this is the real world.
Whether they're dealing with too much blood, not enough blood, Frank Burns' poisoned soul, Hot Lips' Army-superbrat attitude, ripped-open live humans, Painless' idiotic self-misdiagnosis, snotty Army brass, sick babies, power outages, or megalithic football machines, our heroes stay sane in an insane place by PLAYACTING insane. "We don't care who you are or what you think you're entitled to. We don't let our friends or our enemies go insane. We'll do it by out-insaning you." They've found the medicine for Sartre's dictum "hell is other people," or Fall's book "Hell in a Very Small Place." These doctors are anti-doctrine and pro-good-sense.
"MASH" is chock-full of tweaks, takes and jokes at any and every self-satisfied cultural assumption that was mid-late-1900s America - many of which, sad to say, are still here. Insanities reincarnate left and right but a dose of "MASH" will always be the remedy for what ails you.
And it does it all without foul language.