MASH
Time Out says
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 and crew
Director:
Cast:
John Schuck, Fred Williamson, Gary Burghoff, Rene Auberjonois, Jo Ann Pflug, Robert Duvall, Sally Kellerman, Tom Skerritt, Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, Bud Cort
Music:
Art Director:
Arthur Lonergan, Jack Martin Smith
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