MASH, The 100 best movies on Netflix
Photo: Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox
  • Film

MASH

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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.

Release Details

  • Rated:UC
  • Duration:112 mins

Cast and crew

  • Director:Robert Altman
  • Screenwriter:Ring Lardner Jr
  • Cast:
    • Donald Sutherland
    • Elliott Gould
    • Tom Skerritt
    • Sally Kellerman
    • Robert Duvall
    • Jo Ann Pflug
    • Rene Auberjonois
    • Gary Burghoff
    • Fred Williamson
    • John Schuck
    • Bud Cort
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