Brilliant original theme -- but has its limits

Rating: 8/10 (23 July 2003)

Surgeons in the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) keep their moral up by one-upmanship and practical jokes.
They say that history is always distorted because it is always viewed the wrong way. Why should film history be any different? Certainly people viewing the film after the television series may be left a little short changed. Back in 1970 people had never seen Animal House high jinx being interspersed with bloody operations and the realities of war.
On a score of originality it scores a near ten and I give half the credit to the film simply because it was made. If the book had been a 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.