Robert Altman, director of tonight’s film M*A*S*H and the recently released Prairie Home Companion, died last November. He leaves behind an impressive body of work, including Nashville, Short Cuts, The Player, and Gosford Park, notable as ensemble acting pieces in which character and character interaction supercede plot. Altman is not the only director to build his films around people and naturalistic interactions – Woody Allen has done the same for decades – but Altman’s style is less self-conscious and often impishly mines more political undertones.
M*A*S*H, for instance, depicts the daily life of doctors and nurses at a ramshackle military hospital during the Korean War. Altman made the film, however, during the Vietnam War; its audience could be expected to draw some obvious parallels. And in making a movie that is essentially plotless and comic, Altman is offering a satirical criticism of war’s insanity.
If you’ve watched the TV show M*A*S*H, you’ll notice some major differences. Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers as “Hawkeye” Pierce and “Trapper John” McIntyre are more righteous, cleaner, more scripted, and less likely to offend than their film counterparts, Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould. In short the movie is more profane, poking fun at military bureaucracy, racial identity, the sanctity of death, hypocrisy, and self-importance. Also the TV show had a laugh-track, famously turned off during the surgery scenes, while the movie has more faith in its humor and in the audience’s ability to perceive it. For me, one of the most telling differences has to do with the movie’s soundtrack. Both the film and the TV show use the same theme, “Suicide is Painless,” written by Johnny Mandel and Mike Altman (son of Robert). One verse and the refrain cynically go: “The game of life is hard to play; I'm gonna lose it anyway. The losing card I'll someday lay, so this is all I have to say … that suicide is painless. It brings on many changes, and I can take or leave it if I please.” The TV show, however, removed the lyrics and kept it just as an instrumental theme.
As America continues its involvement in Iraq, perhaps this as good a time as any to rescreen M*A*S*H, for it reminds us that no matter where we fight, what military prowess we bring to bear, or what larger purpose we might serve, in the end humanity, however wounded, survives while sanity is frequently the first casualty.
We often try to link the cartoon we show with the movie. Tonight we have a perfect pairing with Jules Feiffer’s “Munro.” Although it is made a decade earlier, Feiffer’s short animated film about a four-year-old boy who is inducted into the army and can’t convince them that they’ve made a mistake, comically unites tonight’s two features. Enjoy, and keep your head down.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
No comments:
Post a Comment