MASH — The Horror of War Played for Laughs
In the opening weeks of 1970, there was nothing funny to be found in the quagmire of Vietnam. President Richard Nixon seemed to be keeping his promise of drawing down America’s troop presence in Southeast Asia. But the U.S. bombings in Vietnam had increased and U.S. military involvement in Cambodia suggested that the war was not winding down but actually widening.
At home, the protest movement didn’t just belong to the hippies anymore. Marches against the war had grown larger, and a wider cross section of the American public was taking part. People were talking about the war on television, at the local bowling alley, at the bar, at work. It seemed everywhere you turned, you were being exposed to someone else’s opinion about the Vietnam War. Except in Hollywood.
Hollywood didn’t have anything to say about Vietnam. Sure, there was Jane Fonda and several other actors who were vocally protesting the war. But the big studios avoided it like the plague. There were hardly any movies made about Vietnam. The one glaring exception was John Wayne’s 1968 flick, The Green Berets, which was either considered an uplifting patriotic picture or a propaganda piece for the imperialist war machine, depending on which side of the argument one stood.
Making war movies during the Vietnam War was tricky business. The last thing Hollywood…
