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Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H premieres at the Baronet Theatre in New York breaking the venue’s single day box-office record. Written By Ring Lardner Jr. from the novel by Richard Hooker, the film’s setting is the titular Mobile Army Surgical Hospital situated near the Korean War’s front lines. Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould star as a couple of raffish Army surgeons who therapeutically counter the daily horrors of their makeshift operating theatre by retreating into a shambolic frat house lifestyle where outre antics like the staging of a mock suicide or the public humiliation of a co-worker serve as a perverse form of mass morale-boosting. A crazy, unapologetically subversive, black humored Vietnam allegory with a tantalising hint of the autuerist flourishes destined to become an Altman trademark.
