M*A*S*H (Widescreen Edition)

this is still one of the funnest movies i have ever seen. if you have never seen the movie ,only the t.v. show then you are in for a treat,the movie is really just scenes strung together and that is part of the fun. donald sutherland is a hawkeye you never knew, elliott gould is trapper john and in a part not done on t.v.tom skerritt is duke and the whole cast is great. so if you have only seen the show get ready for some eye opening comedy.

This movie glorifies sexual harrassment, homophobia, and adultery. "Trapper" and "Hawkeye" are the film's heroes, who are constantly sexually berating nurses. In one scene, "Hot Lips" is exposed while take a shower to the entire camp. She helplessly crawls away naked, screaming, while the entire camp laughs and jeers at her. How can that be funny? This scene was boderline rape.

This movie was created by 60's counter-culture Hollywood to expose the horrors of the Vietnam war. That was accomplished, but the movies' creators exposed themselves as selfish, immoral, and hatefully disrespectful of women.

Although completely devoid of a plot, M*A*S*H nevertheless gives us a penetrating insight into the workings of military medicine in the 4077. What we're meant to discover is that war is hell. Point made.

Unfortunately, that point has been better made countless times before and since. The fresh viewpoint that Hawkeye, Trapper John, and Duke really give us is into the empty soul of the 60's counter culture, a me-first attitude that rejects traditional morality and ridicules authority. They seem to have no goals beyond the desire for immediate self-gratification and "sticking it to the man". It's a depressing look at depressing people.

Still, the film chugs along, delivering a laugh or two here and there until the last half-hour degenerates into an amateur football game film, which was done better by "The Longest Yard". When you realize that Donald Southerland has been out-acted by Burt Reynolds, you might as well turn off the tube.

I'd recommend watching it for the cultural relevance, but as entertainment it doesn't deliver.

In this review I compare MASH with Catch-22, and then include a little plug for another funny, anti-war movie at the end which you may not have heard about that's worth seeing too.

I'd never seen the original movie all the way through until I watched it for the first time last week, so for me this was truly a blast from the past. I was familiar with some of the funniest moments, such as the broadcast of Dr. Burns's and Hot Lips' little tete a tete, but had never actually seen it. Having watched the TV series, I was familiar with the concept, but the legendary original Altman flick that the series was based on was something I'd somehow missed.

As a previous writer here said, it's really a series of four vignettes rather than a coherent movie with a real plot, and the whole movie is an irreverent, sacreligious, and anti-authoritarian and satirical spoof from beginning to end. In other words, it's a very funny movie perhaps lacking any redeeming qualities whatsoever except for that. :-)

For me it was a bit of a shock to see all these actors 30 years younger, as I mostly knew them from their later work, such as Rene Aberjonois, who I mostly knew from Star Trek Deep Space Nine as the constable Shape Shifter. Gary Burghoff was the only member of the original cast who ended up in the TV series, and Donald Sutherland still looks the same. And I really only knew Bud Cort from his classic movie, Harold and Maude.

I made the same comment to a friend about the movie, that it's reminiscent of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, but my friend, who's much more knowledgeable about movies than I, pointed out that they're really two very different flicks both in spirit and in content. Although both are ostensibly anti-war, Catch-22 is a much more cynical and dark movie which sees little good in human behavior and society and doesn't even hold forth the hope let alone the promise of something better. In that sense it's a truly nihilistic film.

MASH is much more lighthearted and shows the characters trying to make the best of a horrible situation as they stumble through the trials and tribulations of the war with, as someone once said about Cary Grant, a sort of "goofy exasperatedness." As one of the characters said, we're all basically crazy anyway, and in MASH that's how everyone keeps their sanity.

So overall, if not a great movie, a great period piece that is still worth your time and money to rent it.

Since we're on the subject of anti-war movies, I can't resist plugging another of my favorites, since it's a great flick and is much less known than the above two. This is The King of Hearts, a French film starring a very young looking Alan Bates and Genevieve Bujold, who are known the U.S., but the other main actors mostly aren't, although some people will remember Adolpho Celli as the heavy in Goldfinger, the James Bond film.

As with MASH, the film is a darkly satiric comedy that pokes fun at the absurdity and futility of war. The main plot concerns a group of inmates from a local insane asylum who escape during the chaos and confusion into an abandoned French town, which sets the stage to ironically contrast the insanity of war brought by supposedly sane people with the harmless behavior of the supposedly insane inmates who are acting out the roles of normal town citizens. And yet it is the innocuous and inoffensive inmates who are caged and the supposedly sane people are making war.

The inmates wander into the town and assume various roles, acting like typical citizens, from the barber to the mayor. The inmates do this so convincingly that the young corporal (played by Bates) who is sent to warn them of the approaching Germans at first doesn't realize they are escaped mental patients, which becomes a metaphor for the real question in the move, which is, who is really crazier: the inmates, or the "normal" people and soldiers fighting the war?

Unfortunately, although he tries, Bates is unable to avert the confrontation between the British and German companies who march into town, and when the two contingents shoot it out (everyone is killed to the last man), the inmates realize the fun is over, that they don't belong in "sane society," and it's time for them to go back to their former home in the asylum.

As I said, I didn't know most of the cast, except for Adolpho Celi, Alan Bates, and Genevieve Bujold, but I thought all the performances were superb, especially Jean- Claude Brialy, who played the mayer, Pierre Brasseur, who played General Geranium, and the barber (unfortunately I don't recall his real name. As with the above two flicks, it's a great movie and a brilliantly witty satire and stinging indictment of the futility and absurdity of war.

As stated before, this is a great DVD but it's already been done with the Five Star Collection MASH DVD. I don't see anything new here. DVD nuts like me really get tired of the studios constantly trying to get us to double dip for the same movie thinking we are going to get some new content. It's ridiculous. If you have Five Star Collection MASH DVD don't bother with this and even if you don't I wouldn't get this version. This package doesn't look as good as the previous release.