Seventies Cinema Revival: M*A*S*H (1970)

Attention. Captain Banning... er, Captain Bandini. [exhales] Attention. Captain Bandini is now performing a femoral po... a popli... a p... a femoral P-O-P-L-I-T-E-R-A-L artery exp... exp... exploration and possible graft.

-P.A. Announcer

When screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., another member of the blacklisted "Hollywood Ten," adapted Richard Hooker's satirical novel MASH, no one expected the film's virtually unknown director to bring anything unusual to the table. Robert Altman had been toiling in Hollywood for years on TV shows like Bonanza, and Combat! But it wasn't until he accepted an offer to direct Lardner's script that he began making his mark in cinema. Most only know of M*A*S*H from its long-running television series incarnation starring Alan Alda. Very few realize that it was originally a film directed by the now legendary director. The dark comedy is a lot zanier and looser than the comedy-drama that ran on TV. It follows the medics of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. Two of the principal protagonists, Captain "Hawkeye" Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Capt. "Trapper" John McIntyre (Elliot Gould), lead the charge in creating madcap pranks that help ease the natural tension and monotony that can arise in the hurry-up-and-wait environment of a mobile military hospital. The objects of their comedic torture are usually straight-laced career military officers that condescend towards them or their cohorts, people like Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) or Maj. Margaret Houlihan (Sally Kellerman). Fans of the series who always wondered where the beloved "Hot Lips" Houlihan got her nickname would be surprised by its obscene origins as presented in the film. During a nighttime tryst with Burns, which ends up being broadcast over the P.A. by Trapper John, Houlihan is heard passionately telling Burns, "Oh, Frank, my lips are hot. Kiss my hot lips." This is but one of the taboos the film so deliciously revels in poking fun at. But surgeons Trapper John and Hawkeye are as talented in the OR as they are at busting chops. Scenes of hilarity are mashed up (pun intended) next to blood-soaked scenes of operating room carnage. Altman's aim is to demonstrate that as undignified or downright profane the doctors' antics are, all of it pales in the shadow of the war that serves as the story's backdrop. The ultra-liberal Altman hoped to comment on the war raging in Vietnam at the time of M*A*S*H's release, largely by ignoring its Korean setting in anything but a handful of references. He attains a level of realism seldom found in even dark comedies by applying techniques which would later become the director's hallmarks. Verisimilitude is achieved by having the characters step on each others dialogue the way natural conversation occurs in life. Performances (by many of Altman's repertory cast working with him here for the first time) are obviously improvised, but still directed to support the story, giving the comedy a streak of insanity that never descends into chaos. And his innovative use of the zoom in the otherwise dull-looking cinematography helps the director focus our attention on any of the multiple goings-on taking place in each densely layered scene. Tying all of the nonsense together are non-sequitur P.A. announcements reportedly transcribed verbatim from real announcements made during the Korean War. M*A*S*H is the type of film that has so much going on that one can always find something new in the margins. M*A*S*H made its debut on Blu-ray earlier this month. While most of the Special Features are direct port-overs from the original 2001 two-disc DVD, there is a great interactive guide one can play during the film to keep its voluminous cast of characters straight. Don't expect any edge enhancement because the Blu-ray is honoring Altman's original vision. The dull-edged cinematography with its hazy lighting was restored for the 2001 DVD, but it has never looked better than it does on Blu-ray. As one of the most important and beloved of American films, M*A*S*H is worth adding to your Blu-ray collection.

Seventies Cinema Revival: McCabe & Mrs. Miller

by Tony Dayoub

Perhaps it was the disillusionment with Vietnam, or the revolutionary assault of American society by it's younger generation that led to the marked change in film from the sixties into the seventies. One thing is certain, westerns had up until then been the dominant genre in American film. And as the realities of the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, and feminism started encroaching on our lives, movie audiences started turning their back on these, and other "fantasies" that existed in American film.

Musicals were dying at the box office... just look at Doctor Dolittle (1967) as Mark Harris discusses in his excellent book, Pictures at a Revolution. War movies were becoming less Dmytryk's Back to Bataan (1945), and more Boorman's Hell in the Pacific (1968). Even John Ford was redefining his own depiction of Native Americans with the extremely sympathetic take in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), his last western. With Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah now becoming the torchbearers of the genre, cowboys were taking on a distinctly antiheroic role. The time had come for an outsider, like Robert Altman, to subvert the western, which he did in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).

Altman was by no means a young novice when he hit it big with M*A*S*H (1970). Already well into his forties, he had made a few less than notable movies like Countdown (1968). And like Peckinpah, he had been a prolific TV director, having directed some of the popular shows of the day, like Route 66, Combat! and Bonanza. But M*A*S*H was the first indication that he was destined for more than the journeyman directing he had done thus far. Ostensibly about the Korean War, Altman admitted that the reason it was such a hit was because it really spoke of Vietnam at a time when few other films were. And while it had many of his hallmarks, like the overlapping dialogue, ensemble cast, and naturalistic approach to shooting, his unique style arguably didn't solidify until McCabe.


The film opens to the haunting sound of Leonard Cohen singing "The Stranger Song" as a man enters frame left riding a mule in the constant drizzle of an unmistakeably northwestern town called Presbyterian Church. It is a mining town slowly drifting into modernity with the building of a church. The man enters Sheehan's, a bar where he sets up a game of poker, introducing himself as John McCabe (Warren Beatty). When the proprietor, Paddy Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois), asks him if he's "Pudgy" McCabe, the man who shot down Bill Roundtree with a Deringer, McCabe doesn't deny it. He just grins as Altman zooms into his gold-toothed smile.

As the myth of McCabe the gunfighter starts spreading, he starts to promote a new enterprise, a prostitution camp. Attracted to the new endeavor, Mrs. Constance Miller (Julie Christie), an opium-addicted madam, arrives in town. Mrs. Miller is the only one to see through McCabe's phony facade to the hard-drinking, charming con-man hidden beneath. She bids to go into business with McCabe to turn the camp into a luxurious brothel. The establishment of the brothel, and the church, accelerates the town's development, bringing both the God-fearing and the corrupt together to form a community.

Soon, the Harrison Shaugnessy Company, in the form of a man named Sears (Michael Murphy), comes calling on McCabe to buy his business. McCabe's response, "Well, Sears, I'm Roebuck. Who'd you leave minding the goddamn store?" McCabe's folksy humor falls on deaf ears, as does his haggling for a greater bid when Sears shows interest in buying McCabe out. Sears leaves, and his company sends out three hired gunmen, a British giant named Butler (Hugh Millais), a kid, and an Indian half-breed, to kill the brothel owner.

When Sheehan tells Butler how McCabe is really the outlaw "Pudgy" McCabe, Butler says, "That man never killed anyone in is life." But as he trudges through the snow, hunted by the gunmen, McCabe has an ace up his sleeve that brings that denial into question, a Deringer pistol.

Altman spends the first hour of the film setting up the house of cards on which McCabe, and Presbyterian Church, is built on. The legend of McCabe is given a lot of credence in the iconic style used to shoot his entry into town. Vilmos Zsigmond's then innovative soft focus cinematography creates a warm, nostalgic, almost historic mood. The haunting Cohen folk songs, heard throughout, serve the same mystical function as a Greek chorus, commenting on the tale and enhancing its archetypal relevance to traditional myths. The silence McCabe adopts when interrogated about Bill Roundtree plays into our expectations of western outlaws and their stoicism when referring to killing.


But once Sears and his company appear, the film shifts into a second hour where Altman explodes the western myth. The outlaw hero, McCabe, is visibly shaken by the quiet departure of Sears. The sun-dappled greenery of the northwest turns into a bleak snowy landscape. When questioned about a gun he carries, an innocent young cowboy (Keith Carradine) explains how he wears it mostly for show, and doesn't know how to shoot it. Goaded into unholstering the gun by one of the hired guns, he is brutally murdered while atop a bridge, falling into icy water, and demolishing the cliche of the honorable gunfight on a dusty street.

Altman's style is never more evident than in this film. His penchant for naturalism comes to the fore in this film, which was shot chronologically as the town was erected. The early scenes are abundant with overlapping dialogue, designed to confuse one's opinion of McCabe. But as his backstory becomes clear, so does the soundtrack, until almost the only sound heard in the climactic 20 minutes is that of snow falling. The cast consists of several actors that had been or would become part of his repertory, including Auberjonois, Murphy, Carradine, John Schuck, Bert Remsen, and Shelley Duvall. And like in M*A*S*H, he uses the setting to reflect his personal views, here the formation of a society.

Altman acknowledges the unimpressive plot in his commentary for the film's DVD. A stranger comes into town and gets together with the hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold to defend the town from a gunslinging kid, a giant, and a half-breed. But he isn't as interested in the cliche plot as he is in what fuels each character's motivation. He is cognizant that societys evolve much the same way the town does in this film, through the push and pull of conflicting moral extremes, as represented by the church and the brothel. Big business generally comes in once the pioneering has been done by the little man, and may sometimes use unethical means to push him out.

Despite just an average box office gross at the time of its release, McCabe & Mrs. Miller has become a cult favorite. It's influence can still be felt today in films as recent as Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (2000) and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007).

This entry first appeared on Blogcritics on 9/7/08.

TV Review: Battlestar Galactica - Final Season Premieres Tonight

by Tony Dayoub

New episodes of beloved shows are starting to trickle in now that the writer's strike is over. One with a rabid cult and critical following premieres its final season tonight. Ten years from now when Battlestar Galactica is being revisited by masses, don't say we didn't told you so. Critics from publications as diverse as Entertainment Weekly to The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker to Time, have all singled out this series as one of the best in TV history. Not just one of the best science fiction series, mind you, but one of the best dramatic series of all time. And why shouldn't they? This is not a retread of the cheesy 70s series that starred Lorne Greene and Dirk Benedict. This is an engaging allegory to our current "war on terror" that will be reexamined in the future the same way classics like M*A*S*H still are today.

Start with the man who first developed this incarnation, Ronald D. Moore. He took the original's premise - a small group of human survivors trying to escape the genocide being committed on them by their former robotic servants, the Cylons - beyond the previous show's limited narrative concept. While the first incarnation used that premise as an excuse for Star Wars-like adventures in space, Moore (who originally wrote for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, another wartime sci-fi gem), used the horrific annihilation of the humans to explore the nature of war, fear, and responsibility towards the atrocities faced in humanity's fight for survival. After Deep Space Nine's series finale he transferred to Star Trek: Voyager. Frustrated with his time writing for Voyager because of what he deemed at failure to capitalize on that show's similar premise - a ship of humans stranded in a faraway galaxy - he left to begin writing for other shows like Roswell, and Carnivale. But he never forgot the lessons he learned writing for those shows, and used them to enhance the new show he was to shepherd. Healthy doses of religion, politics, and sexuality helped the show transcend its silly origins. Torture, child abuse, suicide bombings, rape... issues seldom explored in the sci-fi arena made their way onto Galactica, and propelled it to critical acclaim even though mainstream popularity eluded it.

Now in tonight's episode, the premiere for its final season, will all of our questions start getting answered? Let's work our way backwards through some of last season's mysterious revelations.

Starbuck lives?! - Hotshot fighter pilot, Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff), had died earlier last season. However in the season finale's climax, she flew out to meet her former commander and lover, Apollo (Jamie Bamber), to reveal her discovery of Earth, the long-sought homeworld of humanity's thirteenth tribe. But where'd she get the new, unmarked fighter she was flying? And is she really a Cylon in disguise?

The Final Five Cylons - We've known for some time now that there are 12 models of Cylons that resemble humans. Throughout the series, we've gotten to know seven of them. But in last season's finale, we discovered that four of the final five (whose appearance is a mystery even to the rest of the Cylons) are characters among the survivors we've grown to love. Three of these - Colonel Tigh (Michael Hogan), Chief Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), and Sam Anders (Michael Trucco) - were Cylon resistance leaders under the Cylon occupation. And the fourth - Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma) - is a member of the Colonial President's (Mary McDonnell) staff. Who is the final Cylon?

Gaius Baltar - Baltar (James Callis) helped the Cylons obliterate humanity's first twelve colonies. After surprisingly being acquitted of his crime, he has gathered a cult following. Will he be humanity's unlikely messiah?

Lee "Apollo" Adama - After struggling to meet his father's expectations in the military, has he found his calling, following in his grandfather's footsteps as an attorney?

President Laura Roslin - Prophecy says that she will lead her people to a new home called Earth. Will the return of her cancer cause her to fail to meet her destiny?

Admiral William Adama - Adama (Edward James Olmos) has never failed his people. But as one of the Cylons foretold to Starbuck back in the first season, "Adama is a Cylon." Was it just a dirty trick? Is the Admiral the final Cylon? Or could it have been he was referring to Lee or even his new wife, Dualla?

Hopefully this season will finally answer all of these questions. Any speculation from you readers? Please comment below.

The season premiere, "He That Believeth In Me", will be broadcast at 10 p.m. tonight on the Sci-Fi Channel.