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Bookmark this pageMASH (1970)
Director: Robert Altman
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Altman's idiosyncratic career received a dramatic boost when he took Ring Lardner Jr's script (already turned down by a dozen directors) and turned it into a box-office smash. Dealing with the crazily humorous activities of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital's staff amid the carnage of the Korean (read Vietnam) war, it shows Altman's stylistic signature in embryonic form: a large number of fast-talking eccentric characters, a series of revealing vignettes rather than a structured plot, comparisons of real life with media versions purveyed by the camp's radio, and semi-audible, overlapping dialogue. It's frantic, clever fun, but in comparison with later works such as Thieves Like Us and The Long Goodbye, its cynical stance often rings hollow; its targets - military decorum, religious platitudes and sexual hypocrisy - are too easy, and there's little of the director's muted, unsentimental humanism in evidence.Author: GA
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Cast & crew
Director: Robert Altman
Producer: Ingo Preminger
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Jo Ann Pflug, Rene Auberjonois, Gary Burghoff, Fred Williamson, John Schuck, Bud Cort full cast
Duration: 116 mins
US Release: Apr 6 1970
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