Gould is the best, Kellerman the worst. She makes a strong impression in the first half, then loses it all in the second playing trollop and cheerleader.
Here's my alternate listing of your top ten:
1. Elliott Gould - So not of the 1950s, but terrific to watch: "I hit him, he's an ignoramus."
2. John Schuck - He carries the hardest (snicker) and best (by far) sequence in the movie as a Don Juan struggling with impotence, and plays the rest of the movie very cleverly from the sidelines, which is where you want to be in an Altman film.
3. Tom Skerritt - Because his Duke is not a nice guy, but an interestingly complicated one, and the principal difference between movie and TV series in explaining what the former offered that the latter didn't. In short, he's tough but likeable. His casual ordering Hawkeye around in the opening scene is priceless.
4. Roger Bowen - His Col. Blake is a marvelous distillation of Army incompetance, which Bowen knew from actually having served in Army intelligence. His flat line readings is actually a very clever parody of how authority figures presented themselves in the 1950s/60s, and he manages to be likeable despite his threadbare competence and his affair with Indus Arthur's character.
5. Gary Burghoff - The first word in the movie is "Radar" and so he is, playing off the innocence of others while entirely knowing himself, a little jaded yet altruistic (slipping away with some needed blood in a pinch). He's great because he plays Radar so differently than he would in the TV series (though I liked his Radar there much better).
6. Jo Ann Pflug - She promised to be faithful but you love her anyway, even if Altman upset her character arc by playing the first half of her big departure scene more than 30 minutes before the second (hint: she originally left on the same helicopter Hot Lips arrived in).
7. Donald Sutherland - A very good actor who seems to be slumming here even in a major part, though he gives a few good scenes in between the crap takes Altman made work in the editing room. Too much whistling, too much self-parody, but he's still Sutherland and I enjoy watching him for that.
8. Rene Auberjonois - He does the sympathetic side of Mulcahy well enough, but you really understand how much Altman wanted to get the anti-religious angle across in the wimpy way he handles the scene where Duke calls him over while delivering the Last Rites in OR. "That man is dead, and this other man is alive, and that's a fact", Duke says, and *beep* apologizes for his mistake. Not his fault, but still...
9. Robert Duvall - Well, I like Larry Linville a lot, so I guess I'm going to be a jerk about that here. That aside, Duvall plays Burns so seriously its hard to enjoy his scenes in the film, which is a shame given the film goes to pot after he's gone. Duvall is one of those great actors who doesn't do comedy, and "MASH" is the proof.
10. Sally Kellerman - They loved her at Cannes, Rex Reed tells me, but man does she gurn her way through this film! She does start off well, playing a stick in the mud less self-consciously than Duvall, but once she's punked in the shower it's all downhill. Seeing her with those pon-pons makes me wonder what Altman was thinking.
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ExplorerDS6789
14 years ago
"1. Elliott Gould - So not of the 1950s, but terrific to watch: "I hit him, he's an ignoramus.""
I think he was the only actor who was actually trying to be good. Much like McLean Stevenson in first few episodes of the TV series, he seemed to be the only actor prepared, and if only Elliott Gould had paid the barber a visit before filming, he would have been the only one prepared too.
"4. Roger Bowen - His Col. Blake is a marvelous distillation of Army incompetance, which Bowen knew from actually having served in Army intelligence. His flat line readings is actually a very clever parody of how authority figures presented themselves in the 1950s/60s, and he manages to be likeable despite his threadbare competence and his affair with Indus Arthur's character."
Roger Bowen was really with army intelligence? I didn't know that. Where did you hear about that?
I personally didn't like his Henry, and think Stevenson is worlds better.
"6. Jo Ann Pflug - She promised to be faithful but you love her anyway"
I actually didn't.
"Seeing her with those pon-pons makes me wonder what Altman was thinking."
Robert Altman was an alcoholic drug-addict (it's true, look it up) so he wasn't thinking too much when he made this movie. He took Ring Lardner's screenplay, which won an Oscar by the way, and totally raped it. He told the actors to simply ad-lib, and they do it badly.
Very good analogy you have there. You make some good points. I guess Donald Sutherland wasn't too terrible, but he could have done alot better.
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slokes
14 years ago
<<Roger Bowen was really with army intelligence? I didn't know that. Where did you hear about that?
I personally didn't like his Henry, and think Stevenson is worlds better.>>
I read it in People magazine, in a joint obit for him and Stevenson (who died a day later). Maybe I missed something; Wiki says Stevenson was in the Navy during the Korean War, and that might have been in Navy Intelligence for all I know. I do know Bowen was a pioneer player of Second City improv in Chicago, and credited with developing comic authority figures.
I agree with you that McLean was better, but he played a very different character than the Blake Bowen developed, who is kind of isolated from the rest of the 4077.
I also agree with you on Gould getting rid of that ahistoric 'stache. Though he's more in tune with the 1970 ethos the film is pushing with that pre-Rollie Fingers flavor-saver.
I do love Jo Ann, though. She's great showing Duke her ring.
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ExplorerDS6789
14 years ago
As far as actually serving in the Korean War, Alda and Farr are the only ones I've heard of being in the service at the time. McLean was in the navy, and maybe it was Korea because he'd be too young for WWII. I don't know.
"I do know Bowen was a pioneer player of Second City improv in Chicago, and credited with developing comic authority figures."
I've seen Roger in plenty of things. TV appearances, on Little House on the Prairie, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Barney Miller. He was even in a short film from 1979 with Larry Hankin, and he was good in that too. So knowing that Roger can act, I'm wondering why he didn't do that in MASH.
"I do love Jo Ann, though. She's great showing Duke her ring."
Yeah, she was able to ward off Duke because to her, he was just a drunken idiot. But she had no qualms about being with Hawkeye, and later Painless.
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slokes
14 years ago
<<Yeah, she was able to ward off Duke because to her, he was just a drunken idiot. But she had no qualms about being with Hawkeye, and later Painless.>>
Lt. Dish had qualms about both Hawkeye, and even more so about Painless, where she had to be convinced to render what Hawkeye calls "an act of mercy" in a lengthy scene. The punchline is when Hawkeye shows her why Painless is known as the "best equipped" dentist around, but she's visibly reluctant all the same.
When she's with Hawkeye in the earlier scene in the Officer's Club tent, she's very busy telling him as they begin to go at it that she's committed to her relationship to her husband, and Hawkeye placates her with talk of his own fidelity when sharing the same continent with his spouse. I think I'd characterize her attitude as a "qualm," just not a "barrier."
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ExplorerDS6789
14 years ago
Yet Dish somehow manages to boink Hawkeye. I'd say she's just confused and Hawkeye is a lout who seduces her.
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slokes
14 years ago
Hawkeye is definitely a lout, you get no argument from me there, but Dish seems level-headed about the whole thing. She's not bamboozled. It's clear their relationship has been going on for some time, even though Dish is happily married, to the point where they simply step into a tent and go at it without much back-and-forth.
I like Dish as a character, and Phlug's performance is up there with Gould and Burghoff. Altman tended to play women as more casual with sex than I'd like, but when you allow for that, she's actually made of stronger stuff than other females, like Hot Lips for instance.
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ExplorerDS6789
14 years ago
Another thing about Altman, he apparently didn't believe in character development, which is why the scenes you mentioned are not believeable.
Also, the original MASH novel had little to no sex at all. Altman added that element himself, and it carried over into the show.
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agorachief
14 years ago
folks are forgetting those old movies - ground zero with the golden
gate bridge, executive action with burt lancaster, arnold with stella
stevens, gene hackman's stirring speech in the posiedon adventure.
the little chimp saying "mama" at the end of escape from the planet
of the apes.
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slokes
14 years ago
I think Altman was a brilliant director, though he was better at character exposition than character development. His was more in the style of Hogarth than Vermeer. Hot Lips is a good example of how he played to the cheap seats more than to the heart, but he could also make Elliott Gould the man with witty, gently crafted roles in "The Long Goodbye" and "California Split." If you were an actor, you loved him. If you were a writer, not so much.
Hooker's novel does present a very different 4077, or "Four-Oh-Double-Natural" as he puts it in that odd prose style of his. No one whines about the inhumanity of war like in the TV show, and the depiction of religion and military regulations are not quite as dismissive as in the movie. Frankly, I think the book has its own issues, with all the silly nicknames they come up with and how everyone went to college with each other back East. But the story does have something in the way of a beginning, middle, and an end. Alas, I hear the sequel novels are pretty dire.
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ExplorerDS6789
14 years ago
"If you were an actor, you loved him. If you were a writer, not so much."
I'm neither by profession and I don't care for him. He and Kubrick were rebellious filmmakers who broke the rules and brought out movies that are morally bankrupt and depraved, yet are big successes.
'Alas, I hear the sequel novels are pretty dire."
I've never read them, but they sound like a Ma and Pa Kettle series.
MASH Goes to Moscow
MASH Goes to Las Vegas
MASH Goes to Maine
MASH Goes to Texas
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