I hate both this movie and the TV Series that came out of it.

Rating: 1/10 (31 October 2008)

I remember seeing this movie when it first came out.
I was living in a conservative part of wealthy Marin County, California (I was seventeen), and the movie was being shown in a more liberal "hippie-ish" town that considered itself ultra-cool.
When I went into the theater, I was spotted by a classmate who lived in yet another liberal area of Marin, and he looked at me goggle-eyed. "What are YOU doing here!"
It was sort of the reverse of the kid from the wrong side of the tracks showing up at a party on the "right" side and being sneered at by the rich kids because he is not wearing the latest designer jeans.
America cannot help turning politics into fashion, and this was especially true in the sixties.
So I was eager to see this movie that I - uncool person that I was supposed to be -- was not supposed to be interested in.
What great message would it give? Was I about to have the scales removed from my eyes and achieve a Zen-like Enlightenment?
Other people have already described the movie, which is little more than a bunch of fraternity pranks by over-aged "students" who happen to be surgeons.
It couldn't have been more obvious at the time that, even though the setting was supposed to be Korea, this movie was an anti-Vietnam War movie.
In fact, it was a celebration of crudity, anti-intellectualism, misogyny and cheap moralizing so self-righteous, smug and unsubtle as to make a religious revival meeting look like Plato's Symposium by comparison.
Of course, the anti-war crowd in the theater gobbled it up.
One could see that, for them, it really didn't matter what happened in the movie.
They had all come together to bask in their mutually reinforcing political, moral and cultural superiority.
There was a hateful edge to their cheers and laughter. One almost dared not disagree with them -- any more than, say, a Jew might have cursed at the Nazis during the Nuremberg rallies.
Little did I know then that I was witnessing the dawn of the Mindless and Intolerant American Left, Post-1965-Version.
I will admit that this movie did not incline me to look favorably upon the subsequent TV series.
But how could anyone have avoided seeing at least a few episodes of the omnipresent M.A.S.H. on TV in the years that followed? It just wasn't possible.
So I tried to keep an open mind.
Yes, the TV show was milder -- a sort of soap opera of the tents, with a nice fuzzy little "moral" neatly wrapped up and delivered to its adoring audience at the end of each show.
Thanks, but no thanks.