With the war in Iraq raging ever onward, and public opinion becoming more polarized than ever, I decided to revisit two of the most infamous war films of the Vietnam era, Mike Nichols’ Catch 22, and Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. Both were released in the same year, 1970, but to wildly different results.
M.A.S.H (directed by Robert Altman)
3 ½ stars out of 5
M.A.S.H. follows the episodic story of 'Hawkeye' Pierce (Donald Sutherland), 'Trapper' John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), and 'Duke' Forrest (Tom Skerritt), three surgeons drafted into the U.S. Army and serving in Korea at the height of the war. They’re terrible soldiers, but they’re also brilliant doctors, and like it or not, the Army needs them. The trio of hell-raising misfits bond over their shared life-at-full-speed, nothing is sacred attitudes, and butt heads with the hypocritical and self-righteous Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), harass uptight head nurse “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), and bully their weak willed commander, Colonel Blake (Roger Bowen). The plot is more a series of incidents than a coherent story, but the film is more of a character study than anything structured.
The first thing that I noticed about M.A.S.H. is that its sense of humor is fairly schizophrenic. The opening of the film is pitch black, with the song “Suicide is Painless” (Written by Altman’s 14 year old son) played over a long shot of helicopters delivering the wounded to the M.A.S.H. unit, the 4077th, that serves as the primary setting for the film. One of the stretchers is dropped by a clumsy medic, and gives us the first laugh in the film. Directly following that is a scene of over the top slapstick seemingly flown in from another film. And the film continues in this vein for the rest of it’s running time. It’s also the most casually cruel movie I have ever seen. Hawkeye, Trapper John, and Duke ridicule Major Burns unprovoked at first and the film doesn’t offer up any reasons for their hatred of the man until later. Major Houlihan gets humiliated because she follows the rules and Army protocols, not for anything she has done, and their cruelty towards her veers towards misogyny. The strange part of all of this is that we still end up liking Hawkeye and his crew, we laugh at their rebellious behavior, and the film defuses a lot of their transgressions with a bit of well placed broad humor. They cope with the horrors of the war by living every day like it’s their last, doing all the things we’d all do if we had nothing to live for.
The screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. cuts deeply with its mix of black humor and human tragedy, and won the film an academy award. Gould, Sutherland, and Skerritt turn in outstanding performances, and Altman’s direction makes the viewer feel like they are, in fact, there with the characters at every step, no matter how uncomfortable, graphic, and shocking the proceedings become. There is no doubt in my mind that a film like this would never be made in this era of test screenings and demographics. It’s too uncontrolled, it’s too sloppy, too insane and mean spirited and it doesn’t offer up a pleasing ending. M.A.S.H., while being intense, gritty, funny as hell, is hardly a perfect film however. The film’s episodic structure doesn’t allow for character development, plot momentum, or a satisfactory ending. The football game sequence, while funny, goes on far too long, doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie, and adds nothing. It is one of the major reasons that M.A.S.H. falls just short of greatness as is the film’s thrown together final act. It seems like the filmmakers ran out of ideas, and just ended it. Nothing in the rest of the film builds to its resolution, and it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Catch 22 (directed by Mike Nichols)
4 out of 5 stars
Mike Nicholl’s film version of Joeseph Heller’s anti-war novel was a failure at the time of its release. Critics ripped it apart for not capturing the sense of chaos of its source material, and the truth is, it doesn’t.
Yossarian (Alan Arkin) is an Air Force pilot stationed in Italy during WWII. He’s watched as his friends die off one by one, and he gets an idea. He tells the unit’s doctor that he’s insane, so that he’ll be sent home and will not be allowed to fly anymore missions. But there’s a catch. “In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy and I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy any more and I have to keep flying.” Yossarian becomes increasingly more paranoid and his behavior becomes more erratic. His fellow pilots start cracking under the stress as well, and his commanders are completely oblivious. Like M.A.S.H., Catch 22 has an episodic plot, relies heavily on character, and mines human tragedy for dark humored laughs. Major Major (Bob Newhart) is an inept, nervous man who won’t allow any of his troops to come into contact with him. Lt. Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight) is a despicable, opportunistic war profiteer. The company’s commanders (Martin Balsam and Buck Henry) are unfeeling glory hogs, and General Dreeble (a HILARIOUS Orson Wells) is a tyrannical megalomaniac. The flight crews are made up of Yossarian, the seemingly insane Captain Orr (Bob Balaban), the naive Nately (Art Garfunkel), the amoral Captain Aardvark (Charles Grodin), and Lt Dobbs (Martin Sheen). The film builds up an Us vs. Them situation, only to reveal that nobody is as innocent as they seem, and that the real cost of war is the loss of human decency.
Alan Arkin gives a funny, twitchy, almost desperate performance as Yossarian, the film’s shaky moral center. The rest of the cast is uniformly good, but Arkin is the stand out. The script by Buck Henry doesn’t capture the tone of Heller’s novel, no, but it packs more than a few shocks and pitch black humor in its own right. Catch 22 may not succeed as an adaptation, but it works on its own merits as a film. Mike Nichols juggles the film’s hilarious first half with its tragic second half very well. He rips away the black humor and forces the audience to deal with the reality of the situation. Characters that were played solely for laughs at first become disturbing, Yossarian himself becomes a grim shadow of the rebellious soul he was at the beginning, and it all becomes painfully serious in a hurry. The only major misstep is the film’s final image, a scene played for laughs long after Nichols has shown us that war just isn’t funny.
Catch 22 is a better-made and more structured film than the scrappy, low budget M.A.S.H., but it lacks the visceral punch that Altman’s film does. Halfway through M.A.S.H. one is tempted to start crying. It’s so relentlessly dark and cruel and cynical, that you can’t help but feel depressed and guilty for laughing sometimes. Altman’s film rips apart it’s heroes without passing judgement, it slaughters any sacred cow unlucky enough to get in it’s way, and leaves the viewer uncomfortable and questioning what they’ve just seen. Catch 22 tries the same thing, but settles for a tone of moral disgust in the end, and distances the viewer from the actions of it’s characters just enough that there’s still a comfort zone between the two. The two films are similar in subject matter, yet different in tone and approach. Catch 22 is the better film, but M.A.S.H. is the more effective in engaging the audience.