M*A*S*H's anti-war themes helped to define an era for the better
The long-running TV sitcom made American and British audiences think through the implications of the Vietnam war. No equivalent programme today entertains so constructively.
The extensive coverage following the death of Loretta Swit is a testament to the 87-year-old actress’s charm and talent. It also celebrates the enduring cultural impact of some situation comedies which were truly “broadcast” on terrestrial television in the closing decades of the last century.
Swit, pronounced “sweet”, played chief nurse Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, set in an American mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War. The show was first screened in 1972 when the United States forces were fighting the Vietnam War. After 256, mainly 30-minute episodes, the feature-length finale in 1983, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen remains the most watched television show broadcast in the US, (except for Super Bowls since 2010), garnering an audience of 106 million in its home market.
The TV show was the second screen adaptation drawn from 1968’s MASH – A Novel about Three Doctors, written under a pseudonym by a surgeon who had served in the Korean War. The book owes something to Joseph Heller’s 1961 Second World War satirical masterpiece Catch-22.
M*A*S*H the movie came first, in 1970. It was billed as a black comedy, identified with the anti-Vietnam War movement. The caustic Robert Altman directed a screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. who had been blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy Era.
The film was a hit and initially banned from being shown in US Military cinemas. It won the main prize at the Cannes Festival and an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould and Robert Duvall starred. Sally Kellerman played “Hot Lips”.
As Altman satirised in a later film, The Player, the 70s and 80s were an era when few big screen actors deigned to grace the small screen. Gary Burghoff, who played the camp’s likeable nerd “Radar”, was the only main character who made the transfer to TV, along with an instrumental version of the film’s title song, Suicide is Painless.
The rights were owned by 20th Century Fox who went ahead with the TV series using some of the same main set. Two comedy writers, Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, took charge of development. CBS television showed M*A*S*H in prime time in the US, as did the BBC in the UK.
Robert Altman dismissed the TV version as the “antithesis of what we were trying to do” in the film. The series is lighter and more forgiving but it is still dark, seldom losing sight of its, largely off-screen, context: a war in which combatants and civilians were being killed and maimed and in which young American men were drafted to serve, like it or not. Swit insisted the overwhelming message of the show was always “war sucks”.
The horrors of war are more present in M*A*S*H than in the equivalent British sit coms which also explore humanity in times of conflict such as Allo Allo, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Dads Army.
The change in style from the film is obvious in the switch from baleful Donald Sutherland to Alan Alda who took over the lead character Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce Jnr. The part made Alda a major star. In a profile of the 87-year actor, director, writer, presenter last month in The Guardian, Alda’s “Hawkeye” is summed up as “a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, war-hating, wisecracking surgeon, brimming with principle and soul.”
Major Houlihan is Hawkeye’s antagonist; she is also the only main, or indeed regular, female character. She is a patriotic career member of the military and a disciplinarian. She is also a hypocrite, conducting an affair with a married senior officer.
Swit and Alda stuck with the Series for the full eleven years. After the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, the scripts became more character-based and focussed on generalised anti-war themes. Alda wrote some episodes and directed 32 of them, more than anyone else.
Swit developed the character of “Hot Lips” as well, she became more nuanced and sympathetic, and a fierce feminist who dresses down a male officer: “I’m just as much a major as any other major. You’ll notice these leaves come in gold, not pink for girls and blue for boys.” For all its street-cred, M*A*S*H the film has a male gaze. In a famous scene, Major Houlihan played by Sally Kellerman appears nude after her shower stall is demolished around her in a prank. Altman distracted Kellerman from crouching down to take cover immediately by having other actors pop up naked by the camera. The film historian Danielle Ryan comments that then it was all seen as “a raunchy joke”, while “this entire situation sounds like a lawsuit these days”.
In the movie, “Hot Lips” is a blond bombshell and a target of spite. Loretta Swit was a more nuanced beauty, everyday rather than glamour magazine. In step with changing attitudes in her most famous role on TV, the actress became a career woman in her own right as the show wore on. In the later episodes, she even insisted on downplaying her nickname. In this century, Swit gave a famous rendition of The Vagina Monologues on the London stage before turning to activism on Animal rights.
Hot Lips may out-rank Hawkeye but traditional gender stereotypes are preserved on the show, as they were in real life in Korean and Vietnamese field hospitals. Captain Pierce is the doctor and Major Houlihan the nurse.
Just as M*A*S*H is set in Korea, not Vietnam, nobody would try to make a comedy set against the conflicts now raging. The hospitals operating in Gaza are rightly only the subject of news reports and documentaries. It is striking how many of the doctor volunteers today are women. Even so, for some of the women medical staff in the war zone, TV Hot Lips may perhaps have been a role model and early inspiration.
M*A*S*H is still remembered more for the TV series than the film. Altman, Sutherland, Gould, and Kellerman went on to bigger and better film work. The eleven years as Hawkeye and Hot Lips are definitive in the long careers of Alan Alda and Loretta Swit.
Their show made Americans – and British audiences – think about the implications for themselves of the Vietnam war. In popular terms M*A*S*H contributed to defining an era for the better. There is no equivalent programme to entertain so constructively today, nor an unfragmented mass audience to watch it.
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