MASH (1970)

(On TV, June 2018) Some films are so successful that they sabotage their own legacy, and if MASH doesn’t feel quite as fresh or new or daring as it must have felt in 1970, it’s largely because it was followed by a massively successful TV series and embodied a new cynical way of thinking that would come to dominate (North-) American culture in the following decades. Obviously commenting on the Vietnam War by using the Korean War, MASH shows us disaffected doctors treating the war, and the entire military institution, with obvious contempt. They’ve been drafted, they belong elsewhere and their attitude encapsulates what many Americans had come to think about the military by 1970. Such things are, to put it bluntly, not exactly new these days—and you could easily build a mini-filmography of films in which military heroes behave badly. MASH also suffers from an episodic, largely disconnected plot—there’s a new episode every ten minutes, and it doesn’t build upon those adventures as much as it decides to end at some arbitrary point. Director Robert Altman’s shooting style is also far more similar to newer films than those of 1970—inadvertently scoring another point against itself. It’s not quite as interesting as it was, not as innovative as it was, not as shocking as it was. As a result, it does feel more inert than it should. It’s still worth a watch largely as a historical piece, but also as a showcase for an impressive number of actors—starting with Donald Sutherland, alongside Elliott Gould and a smaller role for Robert Duvall. The metafictional ending works well, but it still leaves things unfinished.