Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [88]
No one involved with the picture had any sense that it might turn out to be an immense hit. “We were completely under the radar,” said Auberjonois. “I seem to remember going into the commissary at Fox and sitting down and opening the menu to get lunch, and there would be the Doctor Dolittle Salad and the Hello, Dolly! Chowder, but there was nothing about M*A*S*H.” There was plenty of indication that Fox executives had backed the picture only because they knew Mike Nichols was shooting the screen version of Joseph Heller’s mammoth bestseller Catch-22 over at Paramount, and they felt Fox needed to be ready with its own antiwar comedy.
Once they finally saw the finished product, however, they didn’t understand what they had. Its freewheeling, plotless structure bore no relation to anything they’d ever experienced. The head of the editing department at Fox predicted that M*A*S*H would go straight to drive-in release. Altman later claimed, “This picture wasn’t released—it escaped.” And then the reviews began to appear.
Although The New York Times’s Roger Greenspun liked the performances and admitted that the film was funny, he didn’t really respond to Altman’s techniques; most of the other important reviews, however, were quite positive—and leading the way was Pauline’s in The New Yorker. She titled her column “Blessed Profanity” and pronounced M*A*S*H “a marvelously unstable comedy, a tough, funny, and sophisticated burlesque of military attitudes that is at the same time a tale of chivalry. It’s a sick joke, but it’s also generous and romantic—an erratic, episodic film, full of the pleasures of the unexpected.” It was perhaps the movie’s unexpected spirit that appealed to her most; she appreciated that “competence is one of the values the movie respects—even when it is demonstrated by a nurse (Sally Kellerman) who is a pompous fool.” Pauline also loved the film’s subversive sensibility and language (“I’ve rarely heard four-letter words used so exquisitely well in a movie, used with such efficacy and glee. I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty”) and Altman’s use of sound: “When the dialogue overlaps, you hear just what you should, but it doesn’t seem all worked out and set; the sound seems to bounce off things so that the words just catch your ear.”
Like a great opera singer, she saved the best she had to give for the aria’s climax:
Many of the best recent American movies leave you feeling that there’s nothing to do but get stoned and die, that that’s your proper fate as an American. This movie heals a breach in American movies; it’s hip but not hopeless. A surgical hospital where the doctors’ hands are lost in chests and guts is certainly an unlikely subject for a comedy, but I think M*A*S*H is the best American war comedy since sound came in, and the sanest American movie of recent years.
The movie that “escaped” wound up becoming one of the year’s biggest successes, and Altman would always claim that M*A*S*H saved Fox (whose executives finally perceived that movies for the new audiences, rather than overdressed musicals, were the way to go). What was most interesting about Pauline’s reaction to M*A*S*H, given that Altman would soon become the director most closely associated with her tastes and sensibility, is that her review is remarkably succinct and in scale. She didn’t overreact to anything, didn’t proclaim the arrival of a new moviemaking messiah—as she well might have done had M*A*S*H appeared later in her career.