Gratuitous Llama Book Review

MASH by Richard Hooker.

Following up on The Irish Elk's intriguing post of t'other day about Dr. William Hornberger (aka Richard Hooker), who wrote the original novel on which the movie and the tee vee series were based, I bowed to curiosity and nipped over to the Devil's Website to buy a copy of the book myself.

Well, I'm glad I did. It's really not a very well written novel, but it is both fascinating and entertaining, with a couple LOL moments along the way.

Go on over to the Elk's post to read about the gradual drift from the original non-political story written by a pretty conservative doctor to the tee vee series that gave rise to the expression "the Alan Alda treatment" by way of Robert Altman's movie. There's really no need for me to remap it here. It's perfectly plain, though, that Korea was not Vietnam and that the people who served there -at least as recorded by Hooker - simply did not have the early 70's mindset enshrined in the screen adaptations.

Nonetheless, although I came to loathe the tee vee series, I've always enjoyed the movie. Naturally, then, I couldn't help reading the book without the movie in the back of my mind. Here are a few quick thoughts about the two together:

-- The movie fiddles with the story, but it really doesn't invent much. All the set pieces - the Painless Pole's suicide attempt, Hawkeye and Trapper's surgery/golf junket to the rear, the football game, etc. - come out of the book, as do many of the mannerisms and catch-phrases. However, it's interesting that the motivation behind Painless's black capsule episode changes significantly. In the book, he simply suffered from bouts of depression. It was only in the movie that he became obsessed with the idea that he might be gay. How liberal is that? (Oh, the Burns/Houlihan sex scene and the shower stunt are both Hollywood inventions, too. I let these pass because I think they're both funny.)

-- I've always thought that one of the weak points of the movie is Robert Duvall's Frank Burns, who is really nothing more than a cartoon character, a pretty good example of Hollywood's view of the Religious Right. While I still lay the blame for this at Altman's liberal feet, having read the book, I understand that he really didn't have much material to start with. Indeed, Major Burns is a composite of two relatively minor characters from Hooker's story - a "sky-captain" major whom Hawkeye and Duke get rid of early on, and a Captain Burns, with whom they have conflicts over his medical imcompetance.

-- Two characters who do get short shrift in the movie are Henry Blake and Father Mulcahey. In the book, Blake is indeed something of a regular army nit, but he also has some common sense and instinctively looks after his men. The doctors of the Swamp come to respect him a great deal. Even more so, Father Mulcahey, aka "Dago Red," is not some fussy, superfluous fly-weight. His devotion to both the camp and its patients is quite marked, he displays wisdom, courage and humorous tolerance, and he is held almost in awe by Hawkeye and his friends. Here I think the hand of Altman, anxious not to let figures of temporal and spiritual authority look too good, is too heavy. It's one thing to accent the boobishness of Burns already on display in the novel. It's something else to alter Blake and Mulcahey to rob them of their more admirable attributes.

-- Ending on a good note, perhaps my favorite line in the movie comes when Hot Lips Houlihan storms into Blake's tent and threatens to resign her commission if Blake doesn't rein in Pierce & Co. Blake responds, "Goddammit, Hot Lips! Resign your goddam commission!" I was delighted to see that this came straight out of the original.

Anyhoo, I think any fan of the movie would get a kick out of reading the book.