Saturday, September 3, 2011

#54 M*A*S*H* (1970)



So, those who know me now might know that my Very Favorite TV Show Ever is The Wire. This designation was granted sometime in 2010, and is still going strong.  Those same people probably know my prior Very Favorite TV Show was Battlestar Galatica, which had a brilliantly blinding and bright but all-too-brief run at the top of my list from 2009-2010.
Those who've known me awhile know there was another Very Favorite TV Show Ever which had a phenomenally impressive run at the top of the heap.  Cheers, which lasted first in my heart from 1990-2009.
But what few, if any know, is that Cheers wasn't my first Very Favorite TV Show.  Oh, no. That honor belongs to a little show called M*A*S*H*, from 1981-1990.  (There was also a brief several month period where the title almost switched to Soap, but then Elaine Lefkowitz the mobster's daughter died in Danny Dallas' arms and I cried and cried so much my mom wouldn't let me watch the show anymore).
I loved Hawkeye, BJ, Margaret, Trapper, Col Blake, Col Potter, Klinger, Frank, Mulcahey, Radar and especially Charles more than I loved my own family. (Not true, but go with it). I preferred Potter, BJ, and Charles over Blake, Trapper, and Frank, thought Seasons 6-8 (after Charles arrived, before Radar left) were the "Golden Years", liked that the final seasons stopped trying to be funny and just wanted to teach, and bragged to my friend Lynette on the bus that I had seen all the episodes, even though she had too. I bought the Jamie Farr autobiography, Just Farr Fun at the Roseville Square bookstore and read it cover to cover several dozen times, even the boring stuff about when he was on Super Password.  And then one day, when I was 13 or so, while pouring through the back of my cable guide looking for Rated R movies marked with an 'N', and hoping it wouldn't once again be just another movie with boobs, I found out about the M*A*S*H movie, which I had never heard of and thought it was a movie Alan Alda and the gang had made after the show had ended.  I excitedly turned it on...and turned it off after about half an hour.  These people were not my friends.  They had nothing to teach me about the Hell of War. They were weird, cold impostors. Plus the "N" stood for boobs yet again.  Sigh. And so it is with great trepidation that I watch this movie today...

Plot summary (with spoilers): The very familiar music strains begin, this time with lyrics, reassuring us that suicide is painless, as helicopters begin their decent upon the M*A*S*H 4077th, bringing incoming wounded.
But first, we meet a not Alan Alda version of  Capt. Hawkeye Pierce. He's supposed to wait at Jeep in Seoul until another Captain and a driver show up to go the 4077th. Capt Duke Forrest (not in the show) arrives, mistakes Hawkeye for the driver and orders him to drive him into camp. Hawkeye plays the part and the two drive off. The MP's see them go and literally run into each other and fall down trying to run after them. Oh boy. They arrive at camp, Hawkeye reveals his ruse, Duke laughs.  They go into the mess hall where Lt Col Henry Blake (not McLean Stevenson) greets them and his company clerk Radar (still Gary Burgoff!  Yay!) anticipates everything Henry is going to say and says it seconds before Henry does. It's cute.  It was cute for eight seasons. They go to their tent and meet their third bunkmate, Maj Frank Burns (not Larry Linville) who is teaching a Korean teen boy named Ho-Jon how to read the bible. Pierce and Forrest say hello to them both and unfortunately Ho-Jon does not say "annyong" back to them. Frank is deeply religious and reads the bible a lot and prays out loud and Pierce and Forrest can't have that and immediately petition Henry to move him out of "their" tent, which Henry does. Okay.  Were we supposed to side with them?  Because Frank really hadn't done anything wrong.
So then the next surgeon shows up and it's Trapper John of course.  He blows bubbles with his gum over and over and he's a thoracic surgeon and he has anachronistic sideburns and he's wacky like the other two.  They torment Frank, show Ho-Jon porn mags, ignore Henry's commands, act like jackasses, but are good at surgery. At one point, Frank berates an orderly and is a jerk to him and Trapper punches Frank in the face.  Henry orders an MP to put Trapper under arrest and when the MP tries, Trapper just says, "Oh, come off it, George!" and stomps off.  Heh.
Then sexy statuesque Maj Margaret Houlihan (not Loretta Swit) shows up.  She's no-nonsense "regular army" and rubs all the men the wrong away (as opposed to rubbing them in the right way.  Zing!  Up top!) except of course "regular army" cohort Frank Burns. Then Henry goes away to a medical conference or something, and Frank is in charge. Everyone ignores him and Trapper even "jokes" in the mess hall loudly in front of everyone that he'd like to strip Margaret naked and fuck her right then and there. But Margaret totally deserves it because she's kind of uptight.
Margaret and Frank compose a letter to the general, complaining about Henry and the lack of discipline in camp.  Then they get so turned on by the letter that they start making out. Somehow, Radar is just outside with a PA system microphone and sneaks it in the tent with them. The rest of the guys listen to them fucking while hovered around the PA system in main office, and hear Margaret say, "Oh Frank, kiss my lips.  Kiss my hot lips!"  Then they broadcast it to the whole camp, which allows Frank and Margaret to hear themselves, so they freak out and stop.  The next day Margaret is humiliated and forever christened "Hot Lips", and Hawkeye taunts Frank until Frank lunges at him and punches him out.  He gets carted off by the MPs in a straight jacket.  Ha...ha?
Some time later, Father Mulcahey tells Hawkeye that another doctor nicknamed "Painless" is having severe emotional problems that Mulcahey can't talk about because he learned them in confession, but he encourages Hawkeye to talk to him.  Turns out Painless is having trouble getting it up with women, so he decides he's a "fairy" and is going to kill himself, as you do. So Hawkeye and Trapper et al pretend to go along with this and give him a "black pill" with which to kill himself.  But first they have a final meal, or a last supper you might say, creating a mildly amusing but also meaningless tableau. As Painless "dies", a solider sings the beautiful "Suicide is Painless" song again, and I kinda think this should've been the first time we heard this song. The black pill is actually a sleeping pill of course, and when Painless awakens, a friendly nurse named Michelle Bachmann is there to cure him of his impending fairydom.
Later still, the guys are laying out in the sun talking about whether or not they think Hot Lips is a natural blonde. They bet 20 bucks, then all go to the showers.  Hot Lips and the other nurses are about to go into the shower tent, and the guys distract the other nurses so that Hot Lips goes in alone. Then as she's showering, they pull the tent apart. She screams and falls to the ground naked and covered in soap as everyone cheers.  She lies on the ground, screaming and weeping and slithers back to her robe and puts it on. She races to Henry and threatens to resign and Henry says, "fine, whatever" and waves her off. But she totally deserves it because she doesn't get along with everyone that well. I can't wait until they gang rape her for not using the proper utensils in the mess hall.
Then, in the next episode of M*A*S*H, Trapper learns that a congressman's son was shot and he's requested to go to Japan and fix him up. He looks at the X-Rays and lies and says the injuries are more severe than they really are. He insists he needs back up from Hawkeye.  They go to Japan, fix the son, fuck around for a couple days, then help a Japanese-American baby who has colic or something. The evil general catches them using the operating room for non-army personnel and threatens court martial, so they knock him out with anesthesia and take naked pictures of him with a Japanese prostitute for blackmail. It apparently doesn't occur to the general that he could have them arrested for that. Then when Trapper and Hawkeye get back to camp they catch Duke sneaking Margaret out of their tent and laugh at him.
Then finally, another general shows up and challenges the 4077th to a football game. Um...huh? So they agree to it, but Trapper has a plan for Henry to hire a ringer, a black man nicknamed...sigh...Spearchucker Jones who is also a former player for the 49ers as a well as a current neurosurgeon and army captain. In 1951, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a black man named Spearchucker who was a former professional football player as well as a neurosurgeon.
Spearchucker shows up, they all play the game, and Margaret is there as a cheerleader, having had the meanness totally fucked out of her by Duke apparently. But Margaret is really stupid now and Henry keeps calling her a blithering idiot for not knowing how to play football. They play and play and play and there are hijinks and our guys win in the end when there is no time left on the clock and blah blah blah fuck you MASH.  Football?!  Really?!
Then Hawkeye and Duke get their discharge papers and go home, without even having to dress like chicks.

Review: Okay, part of my displeasure with many parts of this movie was the fact that I'd already seen nearly all of it acted out on the TV series in the first three seasons. Other than the football game and stripping Margaret, all the plotlines were covered in the TV show. I realize that the show came after the movie, but in my defense, all of the movie's stories were very "sitcom" ready and had a sitcom feel. There wasn't one cohesive plot or story at all. It was basically a bunch of short stories about the war strung together. To be fair, there were things I liked: the suicide is painless interlude, the guy on the PA always messing up whatever he was supposed to be reading, the Col Blake and Radar banter, the Father Mulcahey character who was allowed to be religious but not mocked, unlike Frank, and I really liked the fact that the camera was unflinching in showing the bloody wounded soldiers all throughout the film. There were many, many realistic operating scenes where the camera would linger on the dead or wounded solider while we would just hear Hawkeye and the gang quip back and forth to each other. That was cool, the way it commented on the horror of the surroundings without making a thing about it. There's also an interesting moment when the southern Duke doesn't want Spearchucker Jones living in their tent, but then Hawkeye and Trapper basically ignore him and the plotline is thrown away. Which brings me to...
Things I hated; Hawkeye, Trapper, and Duke. They were sociopaths and generally shitty people. In the TV show, the guys were crazy because they were lashing out at a crazy war. These movie characters would act exactly the same way if they worked at a pizza joint. Also, Frank had no point, and was totally wasted as a villain. Also, football?  The final half hour of a war satire movie was a "we've got to beat the other team by one touchdown in the last second" sports movie?!  WTF, Robert Altman.  WTF. And finally, the treatment of Margaret was just disgusting. She was a bitch, sure, but she in no way deserved the harsh humiliating treatment she received and it was not at all funny. And even worse, her eleventh hour transformation from bitch to bimbo came out of nowhere, wasn't earned, and somehow degraded her character even more. I actively feel sorry for Sally Kellerman.

Stars: Two out of five.

Next, it's a Bobby-athon with "The Deer Hunter", and then "Taxi Driver".






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