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As Hawkeye Pierce, Donald Sutherland plays the penultimate draftee, a drooping, lugubrious sack of sadness who makes Beetle Bailey look like Douglas MacArthur. His sidekick, Trapper, pungently played by Elliott Gould, is a fur-bearing slob with the skills of a Christiaan Barnard and the instincts of a pornographer. "How was it?" he teases Burns, post-coitus: "Better than self-abuse?"
Essentially, however, M.A.S.H. is not an actor's movie. Its furious humor arises from the collaboration of Lardner and Airman, who swing the scenario like a baseball bat. Not infrequently, they shatter the wrong objectives; a parody of the Last Supper, for example, is utterly without wit or point. But most of the time the film is a moon reflecting the sun of battle. War assaults taste, language, sense itself. So do the soldiers who fight it. So do the doctors who aid the soldiers. So does M.A.S.H., animated with a dangerously robust sick humor and a highly civilized savagery. An audience should approach this film as it would a field of live mines.