M*A*S*H / Brewster McCloud
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Robert Altman’s America: A Centennial Review.
M*A*S*H (1970)
Where the standard war film presents the humble army squad as a cross section of American life, in M*A*S*H, Robert Altman zeroes in on the privileged class on the front lines. It’s a genre tweak as essential as Altman’s stylistic liberties to his take on the absurdities of war. The bad boy antics that made 4077th’s trio army surgeons (Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt) anti-heroes in the 1970s read ever more clearly in Altman’s whiplash juxtapositions of the bloody and the bawdy as evidence of a larger moral failure at work.
35mm, color, 116 min. Director: Robert Altman. Screenwriter: Screenwriter: Ring Lardner Jr. With: Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt.
Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation in 2000.
Brewster McCloud (1970)
Robert Altman’s countrified screwball comedy celebrates the oddballs living secretly in the heart of 1970s conservative America. An engineering marvel when it opened in 1965, the Houston Astrodome is the clandestine home where waifish Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort) works obsessively, with the help of Sally Kellerman’s doting guardian angel, on a winged contraption with dreams of flight. Outside, every pathology of American life — racism, sexism, greed — runs rampant in the parade of caricatures and buffoons that populate Altman’s urban Texas, some of whom end up victims of a serial killer also on the loose. It’s a delirious hodgepodge of social commentary and countercultural trip that also marks Shelley Duvall’s big screen debut.
35mm, color, 105 min. Director: Robert Altman. Screenwriter: Doran William Cannon. With: Bud Cort, Shelley Duvall, Sally Kellerman.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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