Review of M*A*S*H (1970) by Donald W — 26 May 2011

This is the best anti-war movie of the 1970's. It's ironic because Richard Hooker the author of the book was a right wing Korean War vet who was proud of his service and wanted to tell some of the humorous stories that happened to people he knew or had heard about.

But the screen writer, Ring Lardner Jr. was a communist who had been thrown in jail during the Korean War. Robert Altman's style of directing mangled both the book and the script developed from the book.

But he made a great movie. Some of the lines in the movie are in the book. The movie was made during the Vietnam War so they tried to fool the audience by putting several Vietnamese props. They even used 1960's football helmets instead of 1950's helmets and the hair cuts were from 1970.

For Americans who lived through the Korean and Vietnam war it didn't matter. It was just one long 25 year war that just changed locations. There were lots of characters in the book but the movie compressed these characters into just a few in the movie.

It made the MASH units seem small. The TV show made it seem even smaller. These mobile hospitals were based on the field hospitals of World War II. I once saw a book that was the official history of the field hospitals in Italy during World War II.

These hospitals were very large with hundreds of doctors and nurses. The MASH units in Korea were smaller but still each one had about ten doctors and a dozen nurses. When I was in college before VCR's were common our dorm got money from the student fund and rented the film MASH to show at a MASH themed party we were having.

Films have a 5 second count down on the leader before the film starts. On the film MASH at the 1 second mark instead of the number 1 there was a picture of a reclining girl in a bikini. When I spent some time in Seattle Washington I saw MASH on a Canadian channel shown on the cable system in the motel I was staying at.

It was interesting that the censors in Canada cut out different words than the American TV censors. Humphrey Bogart made a MASH movie in 1953 called "Battle Circus". I have a laserdisc of the movie MASH and the new DVD.

It's better in wide screen version.