MASH almost did not get released. The executives at 20th Century Fox did not like all the violence. Robert Altman said in an interview: "the Fox execs were panicking over the blood in the operating room. Robert Altman had a habit of chucking the original script and letting the actors just improvise. All of this so infuriated screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr.
Lardner went on to win an Academy Award for best screenplay. It's ironic that a movie that was mostly improvised and where you cannot hear and understand a lot of the dialogue, since it is overlapping in many scenes, would win the best screenplay award. When Hawkeye arrives at the first camp, the audience hears the Public Address system call several men to the departure area.
One of them is named "Robert A," a sly reference to Robert Altman. Hawkeye was based on author Richard Hornberger. Other characters were amalgamations of different people in the th unit during the Korean War years. According to Elliott Gould, he and Robert Altman got into a heated argument on-set after Altman told him that he needed to act like Corey Fischer.
Frank Burns is played by Robert Duvall in the movie; a man who at one time was famous for playing mentally handicapped or mentally suspect some would say crazy people. Duvall's quiet, soft spoken, Boo Radleyish Frank could not be more different from the loud arrogant blowhard Larry Linville in the TV show! This incident was retconned out of the script and the character's back story for the TV show.
At the end of season 5; when Margaret finally marries Donald Penobscott; Frank has an off-screen breakdown. He is sent to a mental institution like he is in the movie; and then quickly recovers, only to be sent stateside to become a Chief of Surgery at a Veteran Administration hospital in his Indiana hometown. All of this happens off screen and is explained by Potter to Hawkeye and BJ.
So in a way Frank does get sent to a mental hospital, just like he does in the movie; but this incident is pushed back about five years to explain his departure. Ironically, in the TV show, Hawkeye ends up going to a mental institution, for a while anyway, in the last episode; just like Frank does. Alda also said the Hawkeye he depicted "seemed so far from me.
I had no idea how to play a womanizer who drank too much, was a smart aleck. I had to figure out how to be that person. We could explore the characters in a way no movie could. The characters could deepen, they could change in their relationships with each other. There were two shy, young, company clerk type Privates, with glasses and clipboards, running around in the movie, and getting into trouble, Private Lorenzo Boone and Private Radar O'Reilly; played by Bud Cort and Gary Burghoff, respectively.
Boone was actually the bigger role of the two. His key scene is when he is helping Frank Burns, played by Robert Duvall, treat a patient during surgery.
Burns makes a mistake and the patient ends up dying. Then Burns turns to the kid and yells at him "See, you killed him! Most people who watch this scene assume it's Radar, because they look so similar , but it's not, it's Boone. In the movie Radar mostly interacts with Henry, using his ESP to predict what his orders will be; and then repeating them, just like he does in the show; and he also helps Trapper and Hawkeye rig a tent where Margaret and Frank are being intimate, and broadcast it all over the camp.
These two characters were conflated into one on the TV show; they were both rolled up into "Radar" on the show; because Burghoff came back for the TV show; but Cort, then a rising movie star after Harold and Maude was released, did not. Pauline Kael, who in was the world's most famous film critic and who was notoriously tough on movies, loved MASH , saying it was one of the best comedies in recent times: "MASH is 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. Both are entities that stand on their own, the movie only served as inspiration for the series.
But the New York Times did not like the movie. Times critic Roger Greenspun said the following "Although it is impudent, bold, and often very funny, it lacks the sense of order even in the midst of disorder that seems the special province of successful comedy. There was actually a whole series of books by first the original author Hornberger , and later by William E.
Butterworth, III a. In the movie, Frank Burns Robert Duvall is taken away in a straitjacket, never to be seen again. However, in the television series, he stayed on for five seasons, and in the beginning of the sixth, the character is said to have had a breakdown, but eventually gets treatment, and is promoted and sent to a VA Hospital in his home state of Indiana. Interestingly, Richard Hornberger, the original writer of "MASH: A Story of Three Doctors'; hated both the movie and TV series based on his book; particularly the TV series which featured a very progressive, liberal, and preachy Hawkeye character; which was the complete opposite of the way Hornberger saw himself.
Conversely Robert Altman; the director of MASH ; thought the original book was "pretty terrible"; he called it very sexist and racist. Altman also hated the TV show that was based on his movie as well.
He said the following in a article about the TV show: "I didn't like the series because that series to me was the opposite of my main reason for making this film - and this was to talk about a foreign war, an Asian war, that was going on at the time he was referring to Vietnam.
And to perpetuate that every Sunday night for 12 years - and no matter what platitudes they say about their little messages and everything - the basic image and message is that the brown people with the narrow eyes are the enemy. And so I think that series was quite a racist thing. I didn't approve of it, I don't like it, and I thought it was the antithesis of what we were trying to do. But most people don't even know this movie exists. If you poll the world, they'd say, 'Oh, that was that series with Alan Albert,' or whatever his name was.
The only commentary Reynolds has given on all of this is that although he is very proud of the work he has done with the TV show; it was a very unpleasant experience working with the actors and the other producers. He said the original shows are very good but in the later episodes the quality waned and the show got preachy.
In the book, Hawkeye was married to Evelyn Pierce and has several children, and is faithful to his wife. In one key scene in the movie, Radar catches Margaret and Frank being intimate in the supply tent.
Acting under orders from the Swamp men Hawkeye, Duke and Trapper, Radar bugs the tent and hooks the microphone up to the camp PA system, where Margaret and Frank's shenanigans are broadcast all over camp. During the incident we hear Margaret telling Frank to "kiss my hot lips! Although when when we're watching the scene it's clear she's not talking about her mouth! But this more explicit connotation was lost in the more censored television version of MASH; in the show when they say "Hot Lips" they are clearly talking about her mouth!
Also there were a couple real life prototypes for Margaret. One was the th Charge Nurse Ruth Dixon. Another one was a camp nurse named "Hot Lips Hammerly". The asterisks in the title were added as a marketing ploy, but the official name of the movie has always been simply 'MASH.
Bud Cort, who would later that year find fame starring in Harold and Maude with Ruth Gordon; debuted in this movie. He played Private Lorenzo Boone. Ho-Jon was a character in the movie and TV show, although he was portrayed by different actors in each. How Hawkeye changed from the book; to the movie to the TV show is very dramatic.
In the book he is described as being a redneck from Maine in his twenties. One of Hornberger's characters describes him as "an uncouth yokel. While Donald Sutherland had not exactly hit the casting bull's-eye Sutherland told me that he and Altman never discussed the Mainer accent called for in the screenplay-"heah" for "here," etc.
When the producers of the television series recruited Alan Alda to play Hawkeye, they not only intentionally missed Hornberger's target entirely but wound up in the woods somewhere. Alda's Hawkeye is flamboyant, intellectual, and manic-almost always the center of attention.
New York-y, even. Where Sutherland's charisma is sneaky, Alda's is all out front. It stretched the limits of plausibility to imagine him back home in Maine, building lobster traps with his dad, but, as Alda told me, "We weren't doing the book, and we weren't doing the movie. I don't think that the somewhat depressed character portrayed in the film would have worked for very long in the show. Borman, played a motorcycle officer. Altman cautioned that Cort might find himself forever typecast.
Robert Altman directed them in this movie. In terms of the MASH franchise, the only actor associated with it including the movie and the TV show who won a competitive acting Oscar was Robert Duvall for Tender Mercies from , although Donald Sutherland was awarded an honorary Academy Award for his body of work in , and at least a dozen actors associated with MASH have been nominated for Oscars; including Sally Kellerman for best supporting actress for this film and Pat Morita who appeared on the TV show for best supporting actor for The Karate Kid Ngor for The Killing Fields , respectively.
His most memorable scene was smoking Marijuana in the bench, wearing 32 on the Blue Team. The on-field footage of the football game was directed by Andy Sidaris, who would later become known for directing Malibu Express and several other B-level action movies starring naked Playboy models. According to Sidaris in an interview, Robert Altman came to him in tears and begged him to direct the game footage because Altman didn't know anything about football. Sidaris said he not only shot the footage, he also helped cast it and even ad-libbed some of the dialogue, including John Schuck's character saying "I'm gonna take your fucking head off!
Then Sidaris looked at the closing credits and saw that they taken his name off. Sidaris was furious. Robert Altman took all the credit. They all thought he directed the football game along with everything else. Robert Altman was no stranger to directing military-themed films. He directed numerous episodes of the TV series "Combat" including 11 in the first season. Although the young Radar is approximately 18 or 19, actor Gary Burghoff was 27 years old. By the time he started the television series he was almost On later audio releases, it was replaced by an instrumental similar to the TV theme.
It is a type of Military Field Hospital: A field hospital is a small mobile medical unit, or mini hospital, that temporarily takes care of casualties on-site before they can be safely transported to more permanent facilities. This term is used overwhelmingly with reference to military situations, but may also be used in times of natural disaster or terrorism. Formally the MASH unit was conceived by Michael De Bakey and other military surgical consultants as the "mobile army surgical hospital.
The U. MASH units no longer exist in the United States military after , although they do in the military's of other nations, but Field Hospitals are still in abundance throughout the world. There are also field hospitals or MASH units on the water, known as hospital ships. A hospital ship is a ship designated for primary function as a floating medical treatment facility or hospital. Most are operated by the military forces mostly navies of various countries, as they are intended to be used in or near war zones.
In the nineteenth century redundant warships were used as moored hospitals for seamen. There are also Air MASH units; The Orbis Flying Eye Hospital is the world's only fully-equipped teaching hospital on an airplane which travels around the world restoring sight, and which carries medical equipment and offers hospital services all over the world.
Many of them came from a book by Richard Hornberger pen name Richard Hooker. A recent USA Today article states the following; "The order from the head nurse was awkward enough: Bring back as many sanitary napkins as possible for the nurses at the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital perched on the 38th parallel. But this was no ordinary PX run for the young nurse during the height of the Korean War.
The getaway to Seoul was doubling as a first date, of sorts, with a handsome new doctor assigned to her unit. Now, here she is at the check-out counter with her date, surrounded by male soldiers. And instead of sanitary napkins, stacked high in front of her are boxes and boxes of condoms - the result of an embarrassing translation error.
Eying the attractive nurse and her cache of condoms, the nearby GIs couldn't contain themselves. The young doctor quietly slipped away, acting like he didn't know the suddenly popular and very red-faced nurse. The young doctor and nurse - who married after the war despite the shaky first date - lived the zany existence portrayed in the popular TV series, which was based on a book written by one of their colleagues in the MASH unit.
Two decades later, physician Dale Drake and his wife, Cathy, helped Hollywood shape the way America saw the Korean War through the lives of the medical staff, military personnel and patients who passed through a fictional MASH unit that was a thinly veiled caricature of the Drake served as a nurse at the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital on the 38th parallel.
The Drakes, who settled in Evansville, Ind. In fact, it may not have, but for an evening of drinking and reminiscing the couple did with the late H. Richard Hornberger during a visit to his Maine home about 10 years after the war. The Drakes were unaware at the time that Hornberger had started writing, then set aside, a fictionalized account of their wartime experiences.
Hornberger - who used the pen name Richard Hooker, and was himself the model for the Hawkeye character - later credited that late-night storytelling session with helping rekindle his fire to finish his book "MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors.
The tent-based mobile hospital was located near the 38th parallel, which now divides North and South Korea. At the time, they were about 10 miles behind the front lines. Cathy McDonough, a native of Shelby, Mont. The nurse, who attained the rank of first lieutenant, returned to Korea in May Drake arrived at the unit a few months later.
The anesthesiologist born in Ohio and raised in Glenpool, Okla. He was assigned to the in and spent 16 months with the unit. By the time he arrived at the , another doctor who knew Drake from medical school had already tipped nurse McDonough that the new arrival might make a good catch.
The two extremes provided ample opportunities to reflect on the brutality of war and enjoy good-natured mischief - and romance. McDonough shipped out of Korea in April and worked at Walter Reed Hospital while continuing a long-distance relationship with Drake. Shortly after he returned to the states, the couple married June 6, The Drakes say Hornberger - and later the producers of the movie and television series - were mostly on target with the depiction of life at their MASH unit.
The operating room and the jocularity. You had to laugh about something because there was a lot of serious business, a lot of unhappiness and sorrow and death," Dale Drake says. When you had a push, there would suddenly be a mass of casualties that would just overwhelm us. The operating tables, for instance, were nothing more than stretchers balanced on carpenter's sawhorses. Reading from another account of the work of MASH units, he has to stop when the author describes how the camp would be packed with the bodies of badly wounded soldiers.
It was a war - nothing but. I had dim views about the whole thing and still do to this day. He attributes part of that to the movie and TV series. Hornberger, who died in , had connected Reynolds with the couple. It was just so out of character for him. Klinger was not in the book or movie. You would have thought Dale and I were the celebrities the way they treated us. It was really neat. Ben Davidson is not a household name. To many generations he was "Rexor" - one of closest evil warriors following the Warlord who killed Conan's mother in "Conan The Barbarian.
Ben Davidson is not hard to find towards the end of the film standing 6' 8", wearing a blue jersey with the number 88 and playing in the big football game against the th's makeshift team.
Many miss the difference between the Movie. MASH the Movie. Hawkeye stays until the Korean War ends. This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Sign In Get started by entering your email address. Sorry, we don't recognize that email A valid email is required. Questions about our Premium Membership?
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