M*A*S*H / Brewster McCloud
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Robert Altman’s America: A Centennial Review.
M*A*S*H (1970)
Where the standard war film presents the humble army squad as a cross section of American life, in M*A*S*H, Robert Altman zeroes in on the privileged class on the front lines. It’s a genre tweak as essential as Altman’s stylistic liberties to his take on the absurdities of war. The bad boy antics that made 4077th’s trio army surgeons (Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt) anti-heroes in the 1970s read ever more clearly in Altman’s whiplash juxtapositions of the bloody and the bawdy as evidence of a larger moral failure at work.
35mm, color, 116 min. Director: Robert Altman. Screenwriter: Screenwriter: Ring Lardner Jr. With: Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt.
Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation in 2000.
