"And if I laugh at any mortal thing,/ Tis that I may not weep," wrote Byron. That philosophical fragment accounts for the duality of all black farce; looking between the cracks, one catches glimpses of hell.
M.A.S.H., one of America's funniest bloody films, is also one of its bloodiest funny films. Though it wears a dozen manic, libidinous masks, none quite covers the face of dread. The time is wartime, any time. Specifically it is the day before yesterday, during the Korean conflict. Somewhere outside Seoul, a group of Army doctors operate —in every sense of the word. Whatever rationality they possess is consumed by the disciplines of surgery. Off-duty they live by a hypocritic oath.
Bets are taken on the genuine blondeness of Nurse Hot Lips Houlihan, and an ingenious method is found to reveal her in the shower. The doctors' young houseboy is encouraged to beat the Korean draft by accelerating his heartbeat with Speed. The pious Major Burns (Robert Duvall) is driven into a strait-jacket when his bed is bugged during a furtive love scene with Hot Lips. Their jubilant moans are broadcast on the camp's public-address system.
At the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, nothing is sacred because everyone is scared—of the incipient madness that seeps back from the front. Ring Lardner Jr.'s overlapping Catch-22-caliber scenes devour congruity as war devours youth. In the abbatoir of the operating room a surgeon saws off a leg while he begs a nurse to scratch his nose. The unit's greatest nurse chaser, Dentist Painless Waldowski, decides that Don Juanism is a cover-up for homosexuality. Better never than latent, he decides after a nontumescent night, and instantly opts for the Right Thing: suicide.
"There will be a lecture on blood and fluid replacement in the mess hall," booms the squawk box, which becomes in time one of the film's most important characters. At intervals it announces the Friday-night movie—always a World War II film—by tonelessly chanting ancient ad campaigns: "The Glory Brigade . . . Uncle Sam's combat engineers showing the world a new way to fight, using bulldozers like bazookas . . . starring Victor Mature." In the closing footage, the last movie announced is "M.A.S.H. . . . follow the zany antics of our combat surgeons snatching laughs and loves between amputations and penicillin. . . starring Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould." And so the movie, having attacked all else, turn inward and takes its own life.
Arterial Gushes. In making the most radical American comedy since Dr. Strangelove, Director Robert Altman decided that nothing succeeds like excess. Often he is right. M.A.S.H. begins where other antiwar films end—after the shells have exploded. Only two shots are fired in the movie, and both come from a referee's starting gun during a hilariously corrupt intraservice football game. Instead, there are the results of bullets; men bleed on-camera in great arterial gushes. The wounded are flown in on helicopters and stain their sheets as they die silently. The film's two main characters retain their sanity the way men have always done in the shadow of death, with a gallows humoresque.