The Razor's Edge

Shenanigans. Elliot Gould, Tom Skerritt, Donald Sutherland

Those of you who think that movies are entirely a visual medium, and that the script is nothing more than a springboard—a prop in a stage play—just try imagining Robert Altman's MASH (1970) without the script (credited to Ring Lardner Jr., who won an Oscar for it). The constant hubbub of overlapping dialogue, the profanity, the screaming, the cockeyed optimism—this corrosive, kinky screenplay does more than delineate character and set situation in the traditional commercial-movie way (advancing the narrative by having the characters "talk" the plot). The screenplay—about Army medics trying to save lives and stave off despair a few miles from the fighting front during the Korean War—binds the visual madness together into a cohesive, realistic world. Lardner and Altman make the movie a critique of highfalutin and hypocrisy—it's blackly funny but not cynical.

Other American movies of the time reflect the Vietnam War, dirty politics, and the country's disgust with itself—Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1967), Irvin Kershner's The Flim-Flam Man (1967) with George C. Scott as an M.B.S., C.S., D.D. confidence man ("Master of Back-Stabbing, Cork-Screwing, and Dirty-Dealing"), Blake Edwards's draggy and tasteless What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966), Ted Post's Hang 'Em High (1968), Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff (1968). Many of these movies simmer with corruption, cynicism, and often what feels like gratuitous bloodshed (although the carnage in The Wild Bunch is a far more sophisticated, ambivalent violence that makes the audience question cherished beliefs about "civilized" manhood). Altman could have gone entirely cynical, too, but what makes MASH so satisfying is that he expresses a realistic idealism—the moviemakers keep their sanity, the way the medics keep theirs, not by a Frank Burns sort of preaching, but by demonstrating integrity and compassion, and disdaining hypocrisy and phoniness. MASH is a picture of redemption.


The bloody work of an army surgical unit is shown in a new way—not for didactic distancing (the way wounded men in war movies in the Forties and Fifties were used as homilies, swollen with sacrificial virtue), and not for the repellent gross-outs and shock effects of movies that use violence pornographically. In MASH, the blood-spattered surgical gowns, scalpels, and clamps are filmed for balance (and mostly in medium shot); the talented medics are humanized by working feverishly in rotten conditions to staunch bloodflow or save limbs (sometimes unsuccessfully). Even the satiric butts, like the prissily bossy "Hot Lips" O'Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and the sanctimonious hypocrite Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), are picked up and dusted off after being scraped across the gravel (although Altman perhaps mishandles Burns's departure by stripping him of any vestige of pride he had—the scene goes for a cheap laugh at the character's expense). The surgery scenes give weight and purpose to the sexual shenanigans and practical jokes. The MASH campground resembles Freedonia, the mythical kingdom of wartime mayhem in the Marx Brothers' great Duck Soup (1933), only it's a Freedonia without the loopy Dada.

Altman's direction is excellent; he and his cameraman abruptly pan and zoom in and out to punctuate visual and verbal jokes, and the hip actors in the cast (who seem to know they're making movie comedy history) take advantage of Altman's generosity by improvising some bits. If the screenplay is a springboard for anything, it's improvisation, and it has the same tone as inspired improvisation. The story goes that Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland quarreled with Altman on the set. But their performances are marvels of corrosive wit, and reflect a cathartic release of tension.

The Last Supper.

The miracle of MASH is that it so successfully combines the taboo breaching of gallows humor—laughing at suffering to stay sane—with the naturalistic coarseness of low comedy: the movie balances bone saws and foul mouths, and spills off the screen in torrents. Although Korea is the ostensible setting, you know that the movie is really showing the madness of Vietnam, and telling America that it's possible to do good work and sustain your sanity and humanity amid the senselessness of bloodshed and strangling bureaucracy. The effect is restorative, a work of humanism. MASH is a Rabelaisian black comedy, and one of the most sensible American movie satires ever.

Moviegoing

I'm very nostalgic for those stray movies between about 1979 and 1983 that gave hip audiences a sense of ownership of those movies—a smaller version of what hit college audiences in the late 1960s with Antonioni and Altman and Mike Nichols. By 1979 we had already been slugged by the space-serial blockbusters and mugged by the calculated emotions of Kramer vs. Kramer and On Golden Pond. But these other movies—like Peter Yates's Breaking Away and the Bill Forsyth movies Gregory's Girl and Local Hero and Fred Schepisi's Barbarosa and Iceman—made us college students feel like an intelligent, respected film audience with minds and good taste in stories and dialogue. I was at U.C. Santa Barbara when Local Hero and Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously opened, and the university audience at the old theater in Isla Vista just ate them up. You were hit with a palpable sensation of satisfaction, and you thought, "Movies can be good."

But whatever it was, it was evanescent and got swallowed up, again, in crummy commercialism and emotional banality—junk like those really awful John Hughes movies and Top Gun and Flashdance. My heart sinks just thinking about how the huge mass of teen crud in the 1980s pushed out what little bits of potential appeared, magically, every so often in the American commercial film.

Almost thirty years later, American movies are a cross-fertilized art of hyperactive cutting and visceral sensations—arcade games and theme park thrill rides. Movies are designed for the enormous resolutions and nanosecond refresh rates. Those who find the current experience breathtaking must be having the time of their lives.

Generation gap. The Godfather (1972)

Before HDTV and home theater systems, people were better off going to the theaters to see not only movies with impressive visual dimensions (Citizen Kane, 1900, La Ronde) but also movies whose intended effects relied on communal audience involvement—not just sidesplitting comedies but melodramas like Now, Voyager that seemed stronger when people around you laughed or gasped when you did on first seeing the slimmed-down, self-actualized Charlotte Vale on the ship's gangway. When we opt to stay home to watch, I think we forgo the communalism of an audience of strangers who are reacting just like us. In many cases, moviegoing really is a shared experience—like a neighborhood's banding together in the face of adversity.

Not so much these days, but there were times when I went to see an old movie (Genevieve, for example, or Panic in Needle Park) at a revival theater essentially to experience the audience reaction to my favorite parts. I wanted to see these strangers respond like me, because their responses made them seem momentarily closer than actual friends. After a good movie—an immersive, great narrative experience like The Godfather Part 2, for example—I loved walking back up the aisle in the dim light with the rest of the audience, and I just knew that everyone was dazedly thinking the same thing, and the god of movies had bestowed a rare gift.