MASH

The style is swiftly established over the credits and in the opening scene, lyrical nihilism up in the air and zoom and overlapping chatter to shred Ring Lardner Jr.'s screenplay. Vietnam is camouflaged ("And then there was... Korea"), the drafted surgeons (Donald Sutherland and Tom Skerritt) ride into the military tent-town in a stolen jeep—the operating theater drips with viscera but it's one big frat house, Groucho (Elliott Gould) joins in for martinis and golf. "A kind of informality" reigns, authority is neutered as soon as the fly-fishing hooks in the colonel's cap get their own close-up. The Bible-thumping quack (Robert Duvall) and the head nurse (Sally Kellerman) are the scolds whose lovemaking is broadcast to the rest of the camp, he's hauled away in a straitjacket while she descends into klutzy cheerleading. "That man is a prisoner of war, doctor." "So are you, sweetheart, but you don't know it." The lineage reaches back to What Price Glory?, Robert Altman's view of the Fifties from the edge of the Seventies is consciously a reconfiguration of the Hawksian group, a classical veneer scraped off so that a new decade's mordant fury pours freely. Viridiana for the death and resurrection of the big dick clouded by doubt (John Schuck), the miracle hangs in the smile of the healer aboard the whirlybird (Jo Ann Pflug). A Japanese visit (cp. The Teahouse of the August Moon), the gridiron mayhem from Horse Feathers, stammering loudspeakers like iris-ins and iris-outs. "The pain grows stronger, watch it grin," as the song goes. This jock wasteland is documented with a camera that's purposefully in the wrong place at the right time, or vice-versa if you prefer. The best ripostes are by Aldrich (The Choirboys) and Altman himself (Streamers). With Roger Bowen, René Auberjonois, Michael Murphy, Gary Burghoff, David Arkin, Fred Williamson, Carl Gottlieb, Bud Cort, Indus Arthur, Kim Atwood, Corey Fischer, James B. Douglas, and G. Wood.