Sara and I re-watched one of the best comedy movies of all tine (it’s in my top 3 comedy movies) It came out in 1970 during the Viet Nam war although the story takes place during the Korean war. Some considered it an anti-war movie but I don’t agree. It is a satirical comedic look at the military in a war time hospital unit. Robert Altman is the Director and gave us a full-time laugh movie with unforgettable characters with names like: Hawkeye, Trapper John, Hot Lips O’Houlihan, Lt. Dish, Radar and Spearchucker. We saw it in 1970 while I was in the Air Force stationed at Seymour Johnson AFB at the base theater with a full house. The laughter started in the first two minutes and hardly stopped until the movie was over.

Below is parts of a 1970 review from the Hollywood Reporter which I fully agree with . A 4*** must see for everyone.

 John Mahoney, originally published Jan. 20, 1970 in the Hollywood Reporter

     *M*A*S*H is the finest American comedy since Some Like It Hot and The Graduate of 197o.    It stars 28 of the freshest, funniest comic improvisers around. M*A*S*H is irreverent of many things: war, sex, bureaucracy, military decorum, but never of the unquenchable spirit of its people, who work with the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital near the front lines of the Korean War and acknowledge therefore that they, too, are prisoners of war in a sense. 

While the point of the comedy requires that much of it be played against some gory backgrounds of emergency field surgery, only a negligible portion of the potential audience is apt to be offended. Nor, in context, will the language of M*A*S*H greatly offend, though at its most commercially groundbreaking, it includes such lines as "Schmuck!" and "All right, Bud, your fuckin' head is coming right off!" 

If one could stop laughing long enough, he would have to admit that the overly pious, the officious, the prudish among the film's company of surgical workers fall victims to some very cruel jokes, but that is as natural to the comedy as it is to the survival of the men and women who perform their jobs with pride and efficiency while desperately striving to maintain their individuality, pleasures and sanity in the constant presence of death. It is a tough, bawdy, bloody comedy, to be sure, and it has to be. 

But despite the necessary, and highly productive, use of caricature, M*A*S*H retains an extraordinary sense of actuality through the use of improvisational delivery which gives latitude to a carefully wrought script. It is fresh and spontaneous, plausible at its most logically improbable, thanks to Robert Altman's superior direction, the script, the fine selection of actors and to an omnipresent camera .