M*A*S*H
A satirical war film by Robert Altman about cynical army doctors in a mobile hospital during the Korean War. With dark humour and chaos, they mock the absurdities of war and military life.
M*A*S*H follows a team of irreverent army surgeons operating just behind the front lines of the Korean War. Led by the wisecracking Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Elliott Gould), the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital is a pressure cooker of trauma, gallows humour, and subversive defiance.
Robert Altman’s breakthrough film, M*A*S*H shattered conventions with its overlapping dialogue, improvisational energy, and refusal to moralize. Beneath the absurdity lies biting commentary on the Vietnam era, smuggled into a different war but unmistakably of its time. With a cast of future stars and a wry, unforgettable theme song (Suicide Is Painless), Altman turns military bureaucracy and battlefield horror into a darkly funny portrait of survival and rebellion. Winner of the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film in Cannes, the festival’s top prize at the time.