Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [87]
“Bob had gotten fired from Warners on a movie called Countdown,” George Litto recalled, “because he had all the actors talking at the same time.” In M*A*S*H he adopted the same technique, in an attempt to dispense with traditional story setups and exposition and to come right in on the action as if he were jumping into the middle of a cocktail-party conversation. Rene Auberjonois, who played the chaplain who goes by the name of Dago Red, recalled an episode that underlined the essence of what Altman was after on film. One night Altman and Auberjonois were walking down Eighth Avenue in Manhattan after a play. There was a lot of street traffic, and suddenly Altman stopped and asked Auberjonois, “Did you hear that?” “He was referring to a conversation that we had both sort of heard,” recalled Auberjonois, “between two people coming toward us, but you could only hear a small section of it. But that small section told you everything. You could extrapolate on that and have a complete scene and a whole story out of it, but you had only to hear a few broken sentences. And I think that was the key—that you don’t hear most of what is going on around you. But what you do hear is enough to tell you the whole story.”
M*A*S*H was a wartime comedy in which not one shot was fired. It was not a piece of military slapstick, like Operation Madball. It was a counterculture comedy: The setting may have been a MASH unit during the Korean War, but the audience’s association was naturally with the war in Vietnam; in fact, specific references to Korea had been deleted. The trio of flip, rebellious doctors, played by Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, and Tom Skerritt, chased women, drank to excess, pulled cheap practical jokes on fellow officers, and thumbed their noses at anything resembling authority; it was their only way of coping with the insanity into which they’d been unwillingly thrust.
Nobody paid much attention to M*A*S*H while it was in production, as studio executives were preoccupied with two enormously expensive World War II pictures that were undergoing various budget and production difficulties, Tora! Tora! Tora! and Patton. That suited Altman: There were certain passages that he didn’t want the powers-that-be seeing in rushes, for fear they might get nervous and start looking over his shoulder, interfering with what he wanted to put on the screen. He used fog filters to give the scenes a fuzzy, unfocused, dirty look—clarity was the last thing he was after. M*A*S*H’s surgery scenes, in which the doctors wisecracked their way through the most gruesome procedures, were graphic—realistic without being sensationalistic. These moments were seamlessly juxtaposed with other hilarious scenes—the doctors pulling down the side of the tent while the officious Hot Lips Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) is taking a shower; Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) asking the pompous surgeon Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) about the sounds Hot Lips makes in bed; and the “Last Supper” sequence, in which the well-endowed, libidinous dentist Painless Pole (John Schuck) decides that he wants to commit suicide.
Even some of the people working on M*A*S*H weren’t at all sure what Altman was up to. “I remember the sound engineer—an old-school, Twentieth Century–Fox elderly guy,” recalled Auberjonois. “I remember him sitting there after a take, and he threw up his hands and said, ‘I don’t know how they’re going to make anything out of this.’” The film was full of overlapping dialogue and barely heard asides,