MASH

This is a film I’d never seen before. That is not to say, of course, that I knew nothing about it. You might have seen cropping up here and there articles by people who’ve never seen Star Wars, watching it for the first time (they are very rarely, by the way, people who were young kids at the time it was released). They might never have actually sat down to watch the films the whole way through, but that doesn’t mean they’re coming to it with a blank mind. The very act of sitting down to watch them presupposes a judgement already, and they will probably have seen clips and know about the general plot, characters and ideas from references by friends, family, and the media. Likewise with me and MASH. I decided to watch it because I’d already been told it was good. This is the first hurdle to get over when watching classics, if we can call them that. MASH is certainly a fascinating film, and the amount I would like to say about it (but can’t here), perhaps indicates its value alone. It is a mix of farce, black comedy and political satire, tragedy, poignancy, and pathos. The carefully choreographed ‘last supper’ sequence, and the poker game with the dead body being driven away in the background are scenes that will stick in my mind for a long time. I found the characters often offensive and rude, but I’m not sure if this is how I was supposed to see them. They are also brilliant surgeons who work hard, which seems to compensate in some way for their arrogance. The film is made up of episodes with little connection to one another, brought into a broad, but relatively meaningless, story-arc of the two surgeons’ brief service in Korea. Perhaps this is what gave the inspiration for a TV series. The film is like one already. However, the idea of tying things together too cleanly (such as the apparent intention to have the Korean boy reappear) would have been too neat. The film does work better as haphazard, irreverent, although the sport sequence towards the end of the film felt relatively redundant and out of character with the rest of the sequences. It’s interesting to read that there was tension between the actors and the director, and that some of the loud-speaker announcements were added later in order to try to build continuity. I haven’t seen many of Robert Altman’s films, and think initially that his method has to rely on exceptional acting, music and dialogue in order to succeed for me, but it certainly does that here.