M*A*S*H - The Movie Video Showcase

M*A*S*H, one of the most popular films of the early 1970s, achieved stardom for Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, spawned a successful television series, and gave its innovative director, Robert Altman, his first financial and critical success.

In M*A*S*H-and to a greater extent in his later films-Altman abandons conventional Hollywood narrative techniques in favor of a very personal style characterized by overlapping dialogue, improvisational acting, elliptical editing, wide-screen Panavision compositions, telephoto shots (specifically shots through windows and past obstructing foreground objects), and the development of a large community and of major characters within a limited time and space. These techniques alter conventions of narrative structure in two ways. First, the improvisational acting, the multiple babble of overlapping dialogue, and the frequently voyeuristic telephoto shots (particularly the shots of explicit gore in the operating scenes) generate a sense of spontaneity and authenticity usually found in documentary, rather than narrative, films. Second, the large number of characters arranged within the wide Panavision frame, the compression of space caused by the telephoto lens, and the continuous barrage of overlapping dialogue, music and P.A. announcements on the soundtrack combine to create an aural and visual denseness that demands much more of a viewer's attention and active participation than does the shallow-focus cinematography, the separation of major characters from peripheral characters, and the one-speaker-at-a-time dialogue of conventional narrative.

When M*A*S*H appeared in 1970, audiences-caught up in the spirit of rebellion generated by the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the drug culture, the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, etc.-revelled in the film's iconoclastic humor, its joyous deflation of patriotism, religion, heroism, and other values cherished by the establishment. The film became an immediate box office success, earning over $36 million in domestic rentals by 1983. The critics also favored M*A*S*H, but while they praised its innovative techniques, some critics thought that the film's humor was too smug and the scenes involving the trip to Tokyo and the football game were flaws in the film's structure. Today critics feel that M*A*S*H is inferior to most of Altman's later films (none of which proved as successful at the box office), though the film is still highly regarded for its innovative narrative techniques and its effective humor.

-Clyde Kelly Dunagan

(...from FilmReference.com)