Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan:
(Objecting to a wounded North Korean soldier in the O.R.)
That man is a prisoner of war, doctor!
Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre:
So are you, sweetheart, but you don’t know it.
By Scott Ross
After you’ve read enough books about movies and interviews with people who make or star in them and seen enough “making of” home-video documentaries, certain essential truisms become manifest, and make sorting things out a little easier. One lesson I’ve learned is that nothing Dustin Hoffman has ever said about a movie is be believed. (I’m not saying he’s a liar. I’m sure he believes every word he says.) Another is that Orson Welles, like Truman Capote, liked a good story better than reality. And yet another is that nearly everything Robert Altman had to say about MASH bears about as much relationship to reality as the contents of the Warren Report.*
One example, at random: Sally Kellerman’s famous shower scene. Gary Burghoff, who played “Radar” O’Reilly in the movie as well as the subsequent television series, has always said that to make her feel less self-conscious he jokingly proposed that everyone on the camera side in her line of sight strip too. Kellerman later said that when the tent flap raised up she saw Burghoff standing naked next to the camera, which the actor confirmed. But to hear Altman tell it on the MASH DVD commentary, it was his idea, and both he and Burghoff were nude. It’s a minor incident, I know, but after hearing Altman claim for two hours that everything that worked in MASH was his and everything he felt did not was due to someone else it was a blessed relief to go directly to The Godfather commentary track and hear Francis Ford Coppola giving credit to his cinematographer, his actors, his assistants and anyone else who contributed a line or a bit of business or made a suggestion that enriched his movie. Altman also never missed an opportunity to run down the Richard Hooker novel on which his movie was based, which he called bad and racist, or (especially) the subsequent television series… which he called bad and racist…
One can well understand Altman’s bitterness. He was paid only $75,000 for directing a movie that, made for less than $4 million reaped $40 million at the box office at the time of its release (back, as they say, when $40 million was real money) and eventually became, through the teevee show, a cash-cow that is still being milked. Further, not only did 20th Century-Fox not exhibit the integrity and basic decency required to reward Altman with even a nominal bonus for having made their biggest-grossing picture of the year and the third highest-grossing movie released in 1970 but his teenage son eventually racked up some $2 million for writing the lyrics to that movie’s theme song. Although Altman liked to claim the movie gave him something more than money — his career — from his consistent, sour comments on it, the financial deprivations of MASH clearly bugged him for the remainder of his life.
About the book and the show, however, Robert Altman was full of shit.
Since first picking up, at the age of 13, the novel attributed to Richard Hooker (the nom de plume of the physician Richard Hornberger, Jr. in collaboration with the journalist W.C. Heinz, who polished the manuscript) I have read MASH more times than any other book, and always with undiminished pleasure. It is true that Hornberger was a social conservative, although his novel does not necessarily reflect that. It is also the case that, having been drafted and sent to Korea in 1952 he missed the period, roughly 1950 — 1951, during which the M.A.S.H (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) units were at their most mobile, so there is no “bug-out” in the book as there often were before he arrived, and which later memorably occurred in the television series. I will further attest that, yes, Hornberger’s novel (like the eventual movie and, for a single season, the show) contains a black doctor called Oliver Wendell Jones and nicknamed “Spearchucker” during his college years as a javelin thrower. But since he is as much a part of “The Swamp” as Hawkeye Pierce, “Trapper John” McIntyre or Duke Forrest, the Southerner with whom he reaches a mutually respectful accommodation, and is a superior surgeon in no way stereotyped or subservient, I have never felt any racial animus toward this character on the part of the author. Indeed, Dr. Jones is such a part of the fraternity of the Swamp he’s also in the two subsequent novels Hornberger wrote in the 1970s.† (Although the author is, I admit, rather freer in MASH with the ugly epithet “gook,” still in use in the Vietnam era, as well as, at least once, “Chink.”) As for the series, which the rock-ribbed Maine Republican Hornberger despised for its liberal attitudes, the charge by Altman of racism is even more absurd. The last thing Larry Gelbart, who developed the show for television, would have wanted to be associated with was a racist series; while I have yet to meet anyone who (aside from myself) remembers watching it, Gelbart parlayed his “M*A*S*H” success into a second, short-lived comedy series called “Roll Out!” in 1973 and which centered on the black supply drivers in World War II France, and that at a time when there were no other series on the American air featuring a majority-black cast. (Even that superliberal Norman Lear didn’t have one until 1974 when “Good Times” premiered.) At least Hornberger ascribes to the Korean locals the wider variety of jobs they performed in the camps, which the series largely ignored… as did, for all his talk of other people’s racism, Altman’s movie.
Aside from the foregoing, the content of the “M*A*S*H” series speaks for itself, as it did for 11 seasons on CBS. The television “M*A*S*H” can be criticized on a number of levels, not least of which was its increasing preachiness and concessions to the vanity of its stars — Loretta Swit’s terrible 1980s hairdos, for example, and the softening of her character to the point where she barely had a reason to exist. But to deem the show as Altman frequently (and reflexively?) did “racist,” is risible.
Exactly why the novel MASH appeals to me to the degree that I’ve re-read it repeatedly since 1974 is a bit of a mystery, one I’m not sure I can fully explain. In addition to my deep fondness for the characters Hornberger created and who have become beloved of, by now, generations of readers, movie audiences and television (and home video) viewers across the globe, I suppose I like the dryness of his prose style and the matter-of-fact tone even when he’s describing outrages both comic and dramatic, as well as the genuinely witty manner with which the Swampmen communicate and the sharp playfulness of their verbal acrobatics, a trait they share in a more self-conscious, deliberately humorous manner with the characters in Catch-22 whose burlesque of language is of course representative of Joseph Heller’s satirical use of vaudeville humor. I admire the oddball characters in the book, seldom as self-righteous as their cinematic and television counterparts. I like its episodic structure — Ring Lardner, Jr., who adapted it for the movies, quite rightly observed that it was less a novel than a collection of short stories featuring the same characters — and the way it, like the movie, begins with Hawkeye and Duke arriving in Korea and ends with their leaving. I appreciate the seriousness with which the operating theatre is treated because Hornberger, like Lardner and Altman and Gelbart, never loses sight of why these men are in Korea. And, frankly, the book simply makes me laugh, a lot. I do think the series bested Hornberger and Altman in one respect: Making explicit what Gelbart considered the material’s perfect existential conundrum, young surgeons patching up even younger soldiers to be sent to the hospitals of Seoul and Tokyo where they will be given fuller treatment and rehabilitation and, all too often, returned to active duty to be shot (or in any case, shot at) and bombed again.
I suppose that, taken together, these novelistic factors simply exert a pull on my literary imagination that is irresistible. And that’s not to mention a few items not even the movie, for all its irreverence, dared to depict. I’m thinking partly of the way the Swampmen torment a staggeringly insensitive Protestant chaplain, partly of the way the “Painless Pole”‘s bout of impotence is resolved by dint of a blue ribbon tied around his prodigious appendage before he’s resurrected (Painless doesn’t know whether he went to Heaven or to Hell but wherever he was, he declares happily, “I won First Prize”) and mostly of the way Hawkeye and Duke raise the necessary tuition, room, board and travel expenses for their young houseboy Ho-Jon‡ to attend Pierce’s alma mater after he’s been drafted by the ROK Armed Forces, wounded in battle and fixed up by the Swampmen: By convincing Trapper John to grow out his beard and his locks, be photographed as Jesus, autograph hundreds of the subsequent snaps for sale as souvenirs and, kept perpetually drunk, be tied to a cross and dangled from a helicopter for personal appearances. It would undoubtedly have made a hilariously irreligious addition to the picture but even the sardonic atheist Lardner, whose only novel (The Ecstasy of Owen Muir) was an anti-clerical satire, wasn’t brave enough to include it in his screenplay and I doubt the lapsed-Catholic Altman could have gotten away with it on a studio picture in 1969 even if he’d tried.
What Robert Altman did get away with in MASH was almost everything else, and which helped make the movie a cultural touchstone and a box-office phenomenon. Although thwarted in his attempt to make explicit that the picture was set in Vietnam (20th Century-Fox insisted on a “dedication scroll” making clear it was actually Korea) those who saw MASH when it was new and the increasingly hated war in Vietnam was raging fruitlessly and murderously on, especially its core youthful audience, had no difficulty drawing the inference.§ They understood that war is an obscenity beside which sexual pranks, irreligious commentary and four-letter words are as a few skinned knees to a holocaust. The things Altman, and Ingo Preminger, the movie’s producer, fought for, such as the bloody, sometimes painful and occasionally excruciating operating room scenes, were the things that mattered, and what MASH was about. (Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, the producer of the television series, had similar problems, at least in the early days of the show, with the suits at CBS.) The stark juxtaposition of humor with genuine horror, common now, was unique at the time. It’s intrinsic to the novel but, even for the late 1960s — the picture was filmed in 1969 but released in early 1970 — strikingly different from the then-current tone of movie comedy.
MASH didn’t sound like other American movies of the time either; Altman placed small mobile microphones on many of his actors, enabling him to catch what was necessary of the overlapping dialogue in the group scenes, such as in the mess hall when Duke and Hawkeye arrive in camp. Then there were screwball bits like the Japanese recordings of popular American songs of the early ’50s from Radio Tokyo and the inane announcements on the camp P.A. system, an effect arrived at during editing, was carried through the picture and which reaches a dazzling apogee at the end, when the announcer nonchalantly informs us that, “Tonight’s movie has been… MASH” and introduces the actors over fast clips from their performances. (Please refrain when describing this to your friends from using the hack-word “meta.”) And while Altman did not write, nor reap the rewards of, the lyrics to the cleverly titled “Suicide is Painless,” the phrase was his, as were the song’s poker metaphors; the Painless Pole (John Schuck) runs a 24-hour poker game in his tent. The look of MASH was different too: Not merely Altman’s use of zooms or the pointed way he and Danford B. Greene edited the picture but the rich, grainy diffusion of the widescreen Panavision images arrived at by the director and his gifted cinematographer Harold E. Stine; the only comparably shot (and edited) contemporary American movie comedy I can think of is The Graduate of 1967. Stine had to be flexible, as when on the day of filming the “farewell dinner” for Painless his director got the idea to shoot it as a parody of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, complete unto Elliott Gould crooking his finger at John Schuck à la Judas Iscariot. Hornberger calls the stag party The Last Supper in his novel, and Lardner repeats the line in his screenplay, so the idea was there from the beginning. It just took Altman’s perverse visual genius to make it explicit.
Lardner, whose credit (and subsequent Oscar) as the picture’s screenwriter was pretty much the last nail in the coffin of Red Scare-era blacklisting, rightly objected to the needless slapstick at the beginning of the movie, when a supply sergeant gets into a physical altercation with a pair of MPs after Hawkeye drives off in one of his jeeps and wrongly to the football game, which he felt was too long and lent the wrong tone, as well as to Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Duke (Tom Skerritt) taunting Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) by leading a group-sing of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” (The pair sing it in his script, but others in the camp don’t pick up on it as they do in the movie.) As to the game, Hornberger spends an equivalent amount of time on it in his novel, and its antic spirit is a needed corrective to the alternative deluges of blood and boredom the surgeons are faced with, both in the book and in the movie. The scenarist was understandably upset when he finally saw a screening of the picture. I doubt he’d ever encountered anything like it, and the shock of seeing and hearing Altman’s revolutionary approach to the scenes and the dialogue must have been profound for a man who got his start writing movie scripts in the early 1940s. Lardner reevaluated MASH over time (his Academy Award surely helped there) and so presumably recognized that Altman did not alter the script so much as he and his cast enhanced and enlivened it. Despite his own narcissism, even Altman freely and repeatedly gave his screenwriter credit for the movie’s shape and form, and its success. Lardner cleverly fused the religious nut in Duke and Hawkeye’s tent in the book with Burns, for example, and the basic structure of the movie is his. Altman credited his writer as well with concocting the vicious but very funny sequence in which the Swampmen wire Hot Lips’ tent for sound and broadcast her assignation with Frank over the P.A. system. (Father Mulcahy: “Is this The Bickersons? I love them.”) On the other hand, I don’t know whether it was Altman or the actors who came up with the notion of Hawkeye and Trapper camping it up the morning after Frank and Hot Lips’ thwarted liaison, but it hasn’t aged well.
That isn’t the only example of dated “fag” humor in the picture. One area in which I fault Altman’s approach is the manner in which Painless reacts to his bout of temporary impotence in, respectively, the novel, the screenplay and the completed movie. Hornberger merely has Painless, a periodic depressive, listening to his prodigious appendage with Hawkeye’s stethoscope and announcing, “I think it’s dead.” Lardner has him assume that after an incident with a nurse in which he couldn’t achieve an erection he’s become “homosexual.” Altman and the movie’s Painless, John Schuck, up that ante (“Well… I’m a fairy”) which to their credit Hawkeye and the other doctors ridicule him for declaring on no evidence other than not being able to get it up a single time. This, in now-typical fashion, leads to current online ignoramuses writing that Painless “comes out as gay” to Hawkeye. Jesus, who breeds these idiots? And why?
Aside: Painless — or in any case, Schuck — is responsible in MASH for the first use of the word “fuck” in an American studio picture. Altman had instructed the actor to taunt his opponent on the football field and in a rehearsal ad lib Shuck barked, “All right, bub, your fuckin’ head is comin’ right off!” He had no idea Altman would use the take. Joan Tewkesbury, in the forward to her published Nashville screenplay, recalled the young 1970 audience exploding into cheers and applause when they heard that.¶
Those who come to MASH only after years of watching the television series can quickly grow bemused or even confused that characters they knew during the show’s long lifetime (and even lengthier afterlife) are so different in the movie. As played by Alan Alda and initially written by Gelbart, Hawkeye Pierce in particular is warmer and less snide than in Donald Sutherland’s original performance. (Alda’s Hawkeye is also a bachelor.) Duke of course never made it to teevee, and Spearchucker lasted less than a season. Radar started out on the series more or less as he was in the picture — Gary Burghoff considered him “a sardonic little guy,” far from the naïve innocent he quickly evolved into on the show. And Lt. Colonel Henry Blake is vastly different from book and movie to series. Hornberger’s (and Lardner and Altman’s) Blake (Roger Bowen) is Regular Army, not a civilian doctor drafted into command as McLean Stevenson’s Henry was on television. While as sweet in his own confused way as his series doppelgänger (the gentle William Christopher) Father Mulcahy (René Auberjonois) is more bumbling in the movie where, with his ginger Irish hair he’s known as “Dago Red.” The character in the picture who is furthest from his teevee counterpart is Frank Burns; Duvall’s Burns is as sour, incompetent and self-righteous as Larry Linville’s on the show but not nearly as much of a ninny. And while Linville is a brilliant comic technician and, occasionally, less than despicable, there’s a deeply unpleasant quality to Duvall’s performance, and to the character as Lardner (and, earlier, Hornberger) envisioned him. Although, despite his loathsomeness and hypocrisy, Frank’s exit from the 4077th, strapped into a straight-jacket and escorted by MPs is, I would argue, not presented by Altman as intentionally humorous — Duvall, photographed behind the rising heat waves of a trash-barrel fire, appears utterly depressed and defeated and even Sutherland’s Hawkeye looks away — viewers whose responses to Burns are trained by years of Linville’s portrayal roar with laughter at the sight; it’s happened every time I’ve seen MASH with an audience, and I would very much like to know if moviegoers in 1970, well before the series took hold of the popular imagination, reacted the same way. Young audiences were so reflexively anti-establishment then that it’s certainly possible even if their current, older selves rush to defend lying hack politicians and government institutions and demand censorship when it doesn’t appear quickly enough to satisfy their well-honed sense of self-loathing. They’ve become Frank Burns.
I don’t mean to suggest by my comments above that Sutherland is in any way a liability to the picture. In spite of his and his co-star’s discontent with Altman and attempts to get him replaced — for which Gould later apologized — the role of Hawkeye Pierce turned out to be a career-maker for Sutherland, who until then had been floating on the periphery of American movies. His persona as an actor tends to be dry and understated if not phlegmatic, entirely unlike Alan Alda’s, which sometimes makes him a bit of a chilly presence. Well, the Hawkeye Pierce of the novel isn’t the most ebullient character in the world either. Sutherland’s cool makes for a nice contrast with the warmer, scruffier appeal of Elliott Gould’s Trapper John and the half-cynical, half-perplexed Southern charm of Tom Skerritt’s Duke Forrest. Skerritt was even more of an unknown than Sutherland. (Gould was Ted in the 1969 Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and had received an Academy Award nomination for his assured comic performance.) Tom Skerritt’s immense likability redeems a character who could have been a boor, especially in the early scenes where he is erotically aggressive to the exclusion of almost any other emotion and, later, a conventional Georgia bigot. Sally Kellerman’s Margaret Houlihan (called, curiously, “O’Houlihan” by both Roger Bowen and G. Wood’s General Hammond, but by no one else) is rigid and foolish but not silly, a complaint one could lodge against the TV version of her, at least in the early years, even as one was laughing at what Loretta Swit said and did. The movie’s “Hot Lips” becomes a bit silly, once her hard shell is softened, as when she leads cheers at the football match and seems utterly bewildered by the rules of the game. (Hot Lips: A red flag! We got a red flag! / Henry: It’s a penalty, you blithering idiots!)
Kellerman’s performance has very interesting curlicues, as when Trapper John is made Chief Surgeon and calls for sex, Lt. “Scorch” (Dawne Damon) is offered up to him and he points to Houlihan shouting, “No, no, no, that one — the sultry bitch with the fire in her eyes! Take her clothes off and bring her to me!” In Lardner’s script, “her eyes [are] blazing with indignation” but in the movie Kellerman’s flash with defiance… accompanied by a smirk of erotic interest. Kellerman’s Hot Lips takes the journey in under two hours that it took the producers of the TV “M*A*S*H” five seasons to achieve. By the end of the movie she’s not only relaxed, perhaps more than could reasonably have been expected, she’s succumbed to Duke’s charms; the look of panic she expresses with only her eyes at the news that he’s being discharged from the Army is remarkable, and gives the character a sudden and unexpected aura of emotional vulnerability. Her best scene, of course, is just after the shower revelation, when she demands that Henry court-martial the Swampmen (“This isn’t a hospital, it’s an insane asylum…”) Altman cannily had Kellerman do the scene directly after she’d gone through the shower sequence, when the actress’s emotions were still on edge and it’s among the pictures’ most indelible moments. I suspect it was this hysterical monologue, and the look of utter disbelief on her face when Henry dismisses her, that got Kellerman her Academy Award nomination.
The company Altman assembled for MASH in 1969 may well have been the best ensemble cast seen in an American comedy in three decades, or since His Girl Friday in 1940, and even there the range of characters was much smaller. I don’t think there have ever been as many “Introducing” credits in a movie before or since, and many of those actors went on to decades of success in movies, television and (in the case of René Auberjonois) theatre. Roger Bowen’s Henry Blake is not the lovable klutz played so memorably by McLean Stevenson; he’s Regular Army yet easily manipulated by the Swampmen and almost pathetically eager to speechify (“Ever since the dark days before Pearl Harbor I have proudly worn this uniform…”) Auberjonois’ Mulcahy is as well-meaning as William Christopher’s eventual teevee iteration but more tenuously connected to the world; he stumbles around in a gentle daze, equally fearful of giving offense to man and God. In the instantly infamous group revelation of Hot Lips Houlihan’s true hair color his first response is to shield Ho-Jon’s eyes, and he’s terrified of giving absolution to the would-be suicide Painless, even though he knows, as Painless doesn’t, that the whole thing is a charade. It was Auberjonois who discovered the blessing for a chariot and suggested he speak it over Duke and Hawkeye’s jeep at the end, sure that Altman would love it. (He did.)
David Arkin is very funny as Blake’s ineffectual aid Vollmer, the unexpected hero of the football game, whom no one in camp respects or heeds and who is heard (along with Marvin Miller and, supposedly, Ted Knight) throughout the picture reading the absurdly gung-ho war-movie come-ons and administrative announcements over the P.A. system, some of which Altman altered from actual memos at Fox. For the series, Gelbart and Reynolds essentially conflated Vollmer and Radar and made him less officious, as Arkin is, than un-worldly. My only complaint about Altman’s otherwise nearly perfect casting has to do with Carl Gottlieb as the anesthesiologist “Ugly John.” This has nothing to do with Gottlieb’s performance but with what seems an almost deliberate misunderstanding of the character’s name. As Hornberger makes clear in the novel, “Ugly John” got his name from being the handsomest man at the 4077th. (At least Gottlieb is, while heavy, reasonably attractive. The casting of the undeniably homely John Orchard, who played the role during the first season of the television series, almost seems cruel by comparison.) Especially notable among the supporting ensemble are the charming Jo Ann Pflug as Lt. “Dish”; the strikingly beautiful Indus Arthur as Henry’s bed-mate Leslie; Ken Prymus singing “Suicide is Painless” during The Last Supper and grinning with the pleasure of performance even as the words he’s vocalizing are wholly to do with death; Fred Williamson, remarkably assured in his movie debut; the understated Michael Murphy as “Me Lay” Marston; Bud Cort as the gullible Private Boone; Dale Ishimoto, splendid as the doctor examining Ho-Jon at the Korean induction center; and the songwriter Bobby Troup as the beleaguered sergeant whose response to the golf-happy Hawkeye and Trapper John is to repeat the concise phrase, “Goddamn army.”
I have written elsewhere that, while I am a militant anti-auteurist, at least as regards non-writer/directors, Robert Altman tends to be the exception to every one of my rules. I was disgusted the other day to stumble across one of those ridiculous internet polls on movies, this one listing Altman as “the 34th greatest director of all time.” I was too dispirited by this to look any further, but I’d be willing to bet that Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese both placed in the top ten, if not the top five. I’m not claiming that Altman deserves the ultimate slot — I don’t know who does, nor do I care especially — but if it isn’t John Ford or Orson Welles or Francis Coppola or Robert Altman, I also don’t know what greatness means any longer. Of all American sound film directors, only these four it seems to me were genuine poets, and seeing their best work not only alters the way one views movies, it alters the viewer.**
Not that there is a great deal of poetry on display in MASH; its tone is too antic, and subversive. There’s nothing in it that rivals the image of Warren Beatty dying in the snow or Julie Christie’s faraway opium gaze at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, or the women listening to Keith Carradine singing “I’m Easy” in Nashville, or the dreamlike imagery of 3 Women, or the haunting juxtaposition of the funeral rites that begin Vincent and Theo with, on the soundtrack, the multi-million dollar auction of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” with its privileged fiscal obscenity, the figures rising ever higher as Vincent’s body is placed in a pauper’s grave. But if ever a filmmaker’s identifiable, idiosyncratic touch is evident from the opening frames of a movie, it’s here. Audiences in 1970 couldn’t have known of course that Robert Altman’s highly individualistic aural and visual aesthetic was, essentially, being unveiled in MASH, but two or three pictures later those elements were obvious and recurrent enough to be considered a personal style. Altman was amused at having become an adjective, and bemused by how often the term “Altmanesque” concerned externals only. But this is the way of such things. What people generally mean by that neologism is items like overlapping dialogue, slow camera zooms, an improvisatory approach (which does not mean letting actors improvise during a take) and ensemble acting. What isn’t considered as often is tone, and the filmmaker’s humanist concerns.
Gelbart always credited Altman with the look of the TV “M*A*S*H,” naturally achieved in miniature, and the series opening is essentially a paraphrase of the movie’s credit sequence, helicopters flying the wounded into the 4077th and the personnel on the ground scrambling to get these damaged bodies to Pre-Op. And if the hills and even the camp itself look uncannily like those of the movie it’s because the series was shot on the picture’s standing sets, and in the hills of what was then the Fox location ranch and is now the Malibu Creek State Park. (The exterior of the Swamp is clearly the same, right down to the Moorish hex symbol painted on the door, but Hawkeye’s gin still is original to the series.) Set designs aside, Altman’s sensibilities are all over MASH, mostly to the good. The innovative use of sound was a key part of his technical approach and I’ve always been taken with the way during Duke and Hawkeye’s discussion with Henry Blake about getting in a chest surgeon the filmmaker cuts to the men on duty in a very busy (and very bloody) Pre-Op while the dialogue continues on the soundtrack, the Swampmen’s point about being understaffed made explicit by the vivid juxtaposition of word and image. Or take the way during the eavesdropping on Frank Burns and Hot Lips the P.A. system attains a disturbing, echoey sound that matches the would-be lovers’ panic. Or how, when the generator fails and plunges the O.R. into blackness and nurses appear with flashlight torches, the doctors begin singing “When the Lights Go On Again (All Over the World.)” Altman’s Operating Room is not only bloodier than the O.R. of the television series, it’s noisier. When Hawkeye is amputating a leg, we hear the sound of the saw cutting through bone. When suction is applied by a nurse, that is heard as well.
Altman was light on his feet throughout the filming, adapting to take advantage of happy accidents, such as the crashed helicopter in the background during the scene in which the doctors question whether Major Houlihan is a natural blonde. (A Fox pilot had crashed the ‘copter; he was unhurt.) In this Altman resembles Orson Welles, as indeed does his concern with sound. When Hawkeye and Trapper John return from golfing in Tokyo wearing plus fours and are immediately engulfed in wounded patients, the director films them at floor level from the calves up amid scrap buckets, blood and gore. (He claimed he wasn’t interested in filming the Tokyo sequence until he saw that image. Yet another load, if you’ll forgive me, of patented Altman bullshit. Why were they wearing those duds if they hadn’t gone golfing in Japan?) Occasionally an attempt at indirection is strained, as when Lt. Dish leaves for home, seemingly in a fury at having been conned by Hawkeye into sleeping with the well-endowed Painless Pole after his “suicide” until, airborne in a helicopter, she looks directly into the lens and grins delightedly.
A much more effective feint is Duke’s homecoming fantasy when Hawkeye announces their orders have come through. It was, in imitation of the novel, in Lardner’s screenplay, but as a realistic scene. Making it purely imaginary is a marvelous touch, as is the improvement on Hornberger in the mess scene in which Hawkeye tells off Major Houlihan and she asks, to the world at large, “I wonder how a degenerated person like that could have reached a position of responsibility in the Army Medical Corps?” In the book, and in Lardner’s screenplay, the question is addressed to Hawkeye who replies, “Sister, if I knew the answer to that, I sure as hell wouldn’t be here.” How much richer, funnier and more satisfying, in the movie, is Father Mulcahy’s simple declaration, “He was drafted.” Curiously, it was not Lardner who gave Kellerman the line that forever connects Margaret Houlihan to her nickname (“Oh, Frank, my lips are hot! Kiss my hot lips!”) He did, however, go further in his script than Altman as far as vulgarity is concerned when, speculating on the color of Hot Lips’ pubic hair Duke opines that he prefers “blonde pussy.” But had there been heard in any movie before MASH the sound of women leading a cheer for a numbered football player (Tim Brown in this case) with the words, “69 is divine!”?
My cavils about the way Altman put MASH together are so few it almost feels churlish to mention them. The O.R. scene where Trapper John gives Houlihan a backhanded compliment (“Hot Lips, you may be a pain in the ass but you’re a damn good nurse”) and she murmurs, “Thanks, Trapper” precedes the shower scene but the change in her character feels like something that should occur much later in the movie, before the football game. That’s a continuity flaw; my other complaints concern content. When “Dago Red” asks how he enjoyed his visit to Tokyo Trapper’s response (“I screwed a Kabuki dancer”) is appalling. Mulcahy isn’t Frank Burns. Why insult the poor man that way? Similarly, there’s a terrible moment of Hawkeye and Trapper babbling in mock-Japanese on their arrival in Tokyo which, judging from the way what Sutherland and Gould say in voice-over in no way matches what the actors are speaking on film, was a deliberate after-thought by Altman. This from the man who constantly accused Richard Hornberger and Larry Gelbart of racism?
As an example of Robert Altman’s perversity, nothing concerning MASH exceeds the germination of what may be its most recognized element: Johnny Mandel’s theme, replicated in hundreds of television episodes and far and away the melody for which its versatile composer is best known. When he conceived the need for a song to send Painless off, Altman very cannily selected the theme (death), the central metaphor (poker) and a title that brought together the name of Schuck’s character with the notion of suicide. Yet he insisted that it ought to be “the stupidest song ever written,” for which his “idiot son” should write the lyrics. Mandel later said he had to get drunk to set Mike Altman’s lyrics which, even if do they revolve around an assonant near-rhyme (“Suicide is painless/It brings on many changes…”) are strikingly mature to have come from the mind and imagination of a 14-year old. Yet his father clearly wanted a deliberately bad song, with “stupid” music. Would anyone still be humming Mandel’s melody if Altman had gotten what he asked for?
To the director’s credit, he was impressed enough by the song to have it recorded for the main title sequence, where “Suicide is Painless” benefited enormously from the superb orchestrations by Herbert W. Spencer. Think of how softly it begins, with strummed acoustic guitar chords in B minor interspersed with finger cymbal chimes and eventual strings and percussion, wrapped around a Brian Wilson-style vocal. The song, and that particular arrangement of it, are so good it is astonishing to see what other movie songs in 1970 got the Oscar nomination Mandel and Mike Altman didn’t. I have no quarrel with “For All We Know” from Lovers and Other Strangers, the eventual winner, nor with the magnificent Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer song “Whistling Away the Dark” from Darling Lili, nor for that matter with Leslie Bricusse’s sardonic “Thank You Very Much” from Scrooge. But can anyone tell me why two numbers no one remembers (“Till Love Touches Your Life” from something called Madron, and “Pieces of Dreams,” from, as they used to say, the film of the same name) were doing on the list even if the latter was by Michel Legrand and Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman?
Mandel, one of the most original voices of his era, was not only a superb craftsman who could with equal invention assay pictures as disparate as The Americanization of Emily, The Sandpiper (for which he and Paul Francis Webster won Best Song for “The Shadow of Your Smile”), Harper, The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming, Point Blank, Escape to Witch Mountain, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Agatha and The Verdict; he was also an accomplished jazz performer and composed one of the few true jazz (as opposed to jazzy or jazz-inspired) movie scores, for I Want to Live! Although his MASH score is brief it includes the most felicitous of several military marches he composed for movies (it takes off neatly from Alfred Newman’s 20th Century-Fox fanfare), a hilariously sanctified accompaniment for Lt. Dish’s unveiling of the Painless Pole’s stupendous accoutrement, deliberately melodramatic underscore for the scene in Tokyo where Hawkeye and Trapper confront the MPs with a mock-serious invocation of spy movie clichés, and an amusing gallop for the football game, complete with slide-whistle. Good comedy scores that do not attempt to be humorous through lugubrious mickeymousing are rare. Genuinely witty ones are the unicorns of cinematic euphony.
Rather shockingly, while MASH received five Academy Award nominations including Picture and Director, it was not nominated for its highly distinctive — and, for its time, revolutionary — sound. And speaking of such things: I was astounded several years ago while leafing through the MusicHound soundtrack guide to note that the MASH soundtrack album was given the lowest rating (a “Woof!”) while the author of the brief review claimed that the LP was pointless and that one might listen to it once but not twice. I grant you that when I got my copy in 1974 and listened to the record incessantly I was a MASH-crazy 13-year-old (and home-video in the form of cassettes or laserdiscs did not yet exist for most Americans.) But as a keepsake of the movie, I don’t see how the Columbia producer Thomas Z. Shepard’s calculatedly messy album could be bettered. Shepard, who for years afterward was Sondheim’s indispensable cast album producer, understood instinctively what Altman had wrought, and brilliantly replicated it as a listening experience. The dialogue excerpts were not only well chosen, they were edited brilliantly, even dazzlingly, into the whole, creating a small small masterpiece of comic collage. If nothing else Shepard isolated some key lines in the football sequence in a way I wish Altman had — so they can actually be heard.
Text copyright 2002 by Scott Ross
*The picture, like the book on which it was based, was called MASH, not M*A*S*H. It’s MASH in the opening credits; the asterisks were added to the poster art, the subsequent paperback reissues of the source novel, the 1970 soundtrack LP and of course the television series.
†Hornberger was also listed as the co-author of a dozen M*A*S*H Goes to… novels in the mid-to-late-1970s but these books, commissioned to cash in on the roaring success of the television series, were written entirely by William E. Butterworth. (His own titles were the 1971 M*A*S*H Goes to Maine and the 1977 M*A*S*H Mania.) Hornberger was infuriated when the movie took off because he’d sold his rights for a mere few thousand dollars — in that he certainly resembled Robert Altman — so in addition to the millions of Pocket Books paperback reissue copies that continued to sell well into the ’80s these “sequel” novels, even if he didn’t write a word of them, were a good means to fast cash for him as the copyright holder.
‡Ho-Jon’s arrival at the 4077th as a war casualty was part of a subplot cut from MASH before its release. Supposedly his dead body was originally removed during the football game sequence, and while one appreciates the filmmakers’ juxtaposition of high-powered leisure activity with grim reality, the moment would surely have destroyed the comedy of the ball game and brought down the entire picture. (Lardner’s screenplay contains a sad, ambiguous moment when a recurrence of his wound is deemed inoperable, but not the boy’s subsequent death.) Interestingly, the North Korean soldier on the operating table is not Kim Atwood, but Atwood is clearly who is subsequently being operated on. It seems obvious that Altman and his editors were forced to splice two separate sequences together for the sake of continuity, but considering the director’s wanton attributions of racism to Hooker, Gelbart and everyone else, there is a whiff of “they all look alike” in the confusion of the North Korean and the former Swamp houseboy. Parenthetically, “Ho-Jon” is allegedly not a Korean name.
§The hats worn by what the U.S. military is pleased to call “indigenous personnel” during the Seoul sequence are deliberately incorrect, as Altman insisted they be Vietnamese and not Korean, even though Hawkeye jokingly says the boy should go to the head of the line because he’s one of Korean president Syngman Rhee’s sons and all radio news stories heard on the soundtrack are datelined Korea. Once again, so much for Altman’s claims. That scroll, which includes one of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s more famous election pledges, reminds me of something Gore Vidal once said of him: “Eisenhower always read his campaign speeches with a real sense of discovery. ‘And if elected… I will go to Korea?!?‘”
¶Being too young to have seen MASH in a theater I had to make do with the autumn 1974 “CBS Friday Night Movies” airing of it which was of course heavily censored. Given the soundtrack album for Christmas, when I heard Schuck say that line the top of my 13-going-on-14-year old’s head nearly came off. I finally got to see the picture on a big screen a year or so later and was bitterly disappointed that it had been re-cut for a “PG” rating, the word “fuckin'” dropped out on the soundtrack (and the Hot Lips shower scene truncated, as well as some of the OR gore). It wasn’t that I had a prurient interest in hearing “fuck” in a movie — this was the ’70s after all and the “R”-rated American pictures I was getting in to see then were becoming routinely more profane, as was the popular fiction I was then reading — but I did want to see my movies, if I was experiencing them in a theater rather than on a TV set, unadulterated. I saw the picture subsequently several times in this bowdlerized fashion, in theaters and on cable, before Fox finally released the original, un-tampered-with MASH on home video. Similarly, when the picture was re-released in 1973 (along with the reissue of the 1970 soundtrack LP I was given in ’74) Fox removed the “Suicide is Painless” vocal from the main title of both movie and record and replaced it with Ahmad Jamal’s funky (and identically-timed) instrumental. Fortunately, the vocal was eventually reinstated in the picture. An eventual CD release of the soundtrack includes both.
**Note that I said both “sound” and “American.” The poets of silent film range from D.W. Griffith and King Vidor to Buster Keaton and his collaborators, and there is no shortage of great, poetic filmmakers, sound and silent, in world cinema.
Post-Script, January 2023
Anent my comments below, in the footnote section, on the M*A*S*H Goes to… novels of the 1970s attributed to William E. Butterworth and Richard Hooker: I attempted over the holidays to re-read them for the first time since the age of 14 or 15, and had to give it up as a bad job after two and a half titles, leaving nine-and-a-half unread. If Hooker wrote any of the material in them, the only trace of his style (and medical expertise) I can find in the books are the occasional passages involving surgical procedure. What Butterworth, their apparent actual author, is chiefly concerned with is depicting convoluted and determinedly “wacky” scenarios involving versions of Hawkeye, Trapper John and “Hot Lips” Houlihan that bear little relation to their previous literary counterparts (and none at all to their television versions) with a growing, and increasingly annoying, supporting cast including an obnoxious Russian-American opera singer, two bumbling New Orleans-based reporters, a sexually suspect diplomat, a gaggle of alcoholic (and extremely unfunny) Cajuns and — God help us — a largely benign, German-inflected, Yiddish-prone American Secretary of State who can only be a comic rendition of that Teutonic psychopath Henry Kissinger. Even worse (if such can be imaged) the social and “comedic” attitudes exhibited by Butterworth, a genuine hack who under the pen-name W.E.B. Griffin published nearly 60 military-themed thriller, are stuck in some weird, reactionary world where women are either brainless sex-pots, alternately cooing or suspicious sitcom-like hausfraus, militant man-hating “libbers” and/or “radical” lefties and gay men are “exquisitely mannered,” wispy little queens or sex-mad, prissy faggots. Butterworth’s moving of the action in these books to the 1970s also makes hay of the characters’ original ages; “Hot Lips,” for example, is described by Hooker/Hornberger in MASH as being “fortyish,” making her, if you care to extrapolate, “sixtyish” in the books although still depicted as a hot, stacked number lusted after by many. At the beginning of the second book (M*A*S*H Goes to Paris) Hawkeye and his wife Mary are expecting another child, although both would be, in Hooker’s chronology, in their 50s. One almost gets the idea, reading these novels, that time has in some weird way frozen since 1951, although Henry Blake shows up periodically as a Major-General. Based on the first three titles, the series is about as ugly a betrayal of the affections of M*A*S*H aficionados as can be imagined. Butterworth even renames Walter “Radar” O’Reilly “Robespierre,” and Hooker lets him get away with it. Robespierre O’Reilly?!?
So few critics, so many poets 