What’s the Big Deal?: The Gold Rush (1925)

An isolated cabin, a frozen landscape. A man is so hungry he boils his shoe and eats it. This would be horrifying if it weren’t funny, on account of the man being Charlie Chaplin. Which raises the question: What if Charlie Chaplin had actually starved nearly to death and had to eat his shoe? Would that have been funny? We’ll never know, because Charlie Chaplin was never hungry. But we have another question: Why is The Gold Rush — a film made 86 years ago — still cited today as one of the great comedies? Let’s stick forks in our dinner rolls and investigate.

The praise: The Gold Rush was the highest-grossing comedy of the Silent Era, and the fifth-highest-grossing movie of any genre in that era. Chaplin himself always said it was the one movie he’d most like to be remembered for. It ranked No. 74 on the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the 100 best movies of all time (one of only four silents), and rose to No. 58 on the 2007 revised list.

The context: When Charlie Chaplin started shooting The Gold Rush in early 1924, he was already one of the world’s biggest movie stars, having earned his fame through dozens of short films starting in 1914. In many of these he played the nameless Little Tramp, a creation that was itself one of the most recognizable characters in all of entertainment. The Tramp’s first appearance in a feature-length movie — and the first non-short directed by Chaplin — was The Kid (1921). This was followed by a few more shorts and a 59-minute feature (1923's The Pilgrim), and then at last, by The Gold Rush. By this time, movie fans awaited a new Chaplin picture the way viewers of a later generation would clamor for the next Star Wars.

Adding to the excitement was the fact that Chaplin usually took a long time to make a film. He was a perfectionist, yes, but he also tended to start shooting with only a bare outline of ideas, not a completed script. He and his actors would work out the comedy bits — with the cameras rolling — until Chaplin liked what they had, then shoot it “for real,” if necessary. The story would emerge during this process; sometimes he’d have to go back and re-do an earlier scene in order to accommodate a plot point that he came up with later.

As it happens, none of that is relevant to the matter at hand, because Chaplin actually had a script written when he started shooting The Gold Rush. But the production was delayed anyway for an entirely different reason: Chaplin knocked up his lead actress. Lita Grey was only 16 at the time (Chaplin was 35), so they hastily married to minimize the scandal and avoid potential legal problems. (It has been suggested that this was the inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Georgia Hale replaced Grey in the film and reshot the scenes she’d completed. The film had begun shooting in February 1924; it didn’t wrap until May 1925.

With all that behind-the-scenes drama, the delays, and the excitement that generally accompanied a new Chaplin movie anyway, you may well imagine how filmgoers reacted when the delightful finished product finally arrived. It performed exceedingly well at the box office, as noted above, and the critics loved it, too. (Said Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times: “Here is a comedy with streaks of poetry, pathos, tenderness, linked with brusqueness and boisterousness. It is the outstanding gem of all Chaplin’s pictures.”

In 1942, long after the Silent Era had given way to talkies and the Little Tramp had appeared on film for the last time, Chaplin made the bold decision to re-release The Gold Rush — as a sound picture. He wrote narration (and recorded it himself) to replace the intertitles, and commissioned a new musical score. Other sound effects were added as necessary. While he was at it, Chaplin did some tinkering with the editing, tightening a few things here and there, removing a couple of small plot points. Most of the film remained intact, though; the difference in running times — 96 minutes originally, 72 minutes for the re-release — is mostly attributable to the new version playing at an established speed of 24 frames per second, whereas silent films tended to run slower. The musical score and sound recording were nominated for Oscars, and the re-release was met with popular success once again.

The movie: During the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, the Little Tramp goes prospecting in the ice and snow. He encounters a fugitive, a soon-to-be-rich prospector, a beautiful saloon girl, and a bear. Starvation, deprivation, and flirtation ensue.

What it influenced: Several scenes from the movie are iconic and have been imitated, homaged, or parodied elsewhere. These include:

- The starving prospector hallucinating that the Little Tramp is a chicken. After this, it became a fairly common gag in animated cartoons to have a hungry character imagine that whoever is nearby is a chicken or some other food item. Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, and Tom and Jerry all employed it; so has The Simpsons. In fact, here’s a pretty good list of the many instances this device has appeared in TV, movies, and comics. (By the way, would you like to read an article about starvation-themed cartoons? Of course you would.)

- The one-room shack teetering on the edge of a cliff. Based on the movements of the people inside, it either remains stable or starts to tip over. You usually see this device employed with an automobile nowadays, and not usually for laughs. For that matter, it’s not likely that The Gold Rush invented it, since it plays on a fairly basic element of physical comedy. Still, it’s an iconic image, and there you go.

- The Tramp sticking forks in two dinner rolls and performing a little dance as if the forks were legs and the rolls feet. (This had actually been done before at least once, in the 1917 Fatty Arbuckle short “The Rough House,” but The Gold Rush made it famous.) Probably the most familiar homage was Johnny Depp’s oddball character (a real departure for Depp) doing it in Benny & Joon (1993), but it’s also appeared in movies as diverse as A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), a 1935 Three Stooges short (“Pardon My Scotch”), Band of Outsiders (1964), and Meet the Robinsons (2007).

- The Tramp boiling and eating his shoe. Like the person-as-food hallucination, this became a common gag in starvation-themed cartoons, and indeed a stereotypical image of exaggerated starvation. Adding to its notoriety was the fact that it’s actually been known to happen, including among the members of the Donner party, whose story provided some of Chaplin’s inspiration for The Gold Rush. The line between tragedy and comedy is very thin.

What to look for: The most readily available DVD release, from 2003, has the 1942 version on Disc 1 and the original silent version as an extra on the bonus disc. Both are terrific, though purists will want to see the original first. On the other hand, Chaplin’s estate apparently considers the 1942 version to be the “official” one, since it’s the main feature on the DVDs. Anyway, if you get it from Netflix, just be aware that the original is on the bonus disc.

The opening credits describe the film as “a dramatic comedy.” The drama doesn’t enter until halfway in, when the Tramp falls in love with the saloon girl. Like most Chaplin films, a sweet and melancholy tone develops to underscore the comedy.

You know that thing where a character finally gets a kiss or a date from his dream girl, plays it cool, then goes wild with celebration as soon as she’s gone, only to be embarrassed when she comes back and sees his jubilation? It happens in The Gold Rush. Probably not the first time it ever happened in a movie, but certainly one of the earliest instances.

What’s the big deal: There wasn’t anything particularly revolutionary about The Gold Rush. Chaplin made several great films; this was simply one of them. But its popularity kept Chaplin afloat as the king of silent comedy. If this one had failed, he might not have been able to make City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator. Collectively, all of these constitute Chaplin’s legacy. He inspired the physical zaniness of the Marx Brothers, who inspired Monty Python, who inspired Saturday Night Live, and so on and so forth. Chaplin is one of the founding fathers of movie comedy, and The Gold Rush is one of his most consistently entertaining works.

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What’s the Big Deal?: City Lights (1931).

What’s the Big Deal?: Mean Streets (1973)

Before there was Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas there was Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough film and his first collaboration with Robert De Niro. What significance does this 38-year-old drama about Little Italy thugs have for movies today? Let’s investigate.

The praise: Time Out magazine called it “one of the best American films of the decade.” The New York Times called it an “unequivocally first-class film.” Robert De Niro won the National Society of Film Critics Award for best supporting actor. In 1997, the Library of Congress selected Mean Streets for preservation in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

The context: Martin Scorsese was born in New York City in 1942 and grew up watching movies because his asthma and general sickliness prevented him from playing sports with the other kids. His family was devoutly Catholic, and he considered joining the priesthood before turning to moviemaking. He graduated from New York University’s film school in 1966, when the very idea of “film school” was still new.

Though Scorsese has the honor of being one of the first major directors to have gone to film school (and he started his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, while he was there), it was afterward, when he worked for B-movie king Roger Corman, that he says he really learned how to make a movie. Say what you will about Corman — that most of his productions were cheap schlock, for example — the guy knew how to make something fast and under budget. Under Corman’s tutelage, Scorsese directed Boxcar Bertha (1972), an exploitation flick about 1930s outlaws. With that experience under his belt, and encouraged by friends to make a personal movie, he went to work on something called Season of the Witch. That title was eventually changed to Mean Streets, borrowing a phrase from a Raymond Chandler essay.

Mean Streets was a spiritual sequel to Who’s That Knocking at My Door and starred the same actor, Harvey Keitel, whom Scorsese had met while in college. Co-writing the screenplay with his friend Mardik Martin, Scorsese drew from his life in Little Italy to paint an authentic picture of the neighborhood at that time. He hadn’t just grown up there; he had lived with his parents there until just a few years earlier. He was still a local boy.

Scorsese took the finished screenplay to Corman, who said he’d finance it if Scorsese rewrote it for an all-black cast. (The ever-pragmatic Corman wanted to cash in on the new blaxploitation sub-genre.) Scorsese, who was writing about the world he grew up in and was eager to tell a personal story, passed. The movie was financed through other means, and a cast was assembled.

It was to be the first collaboration between Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who met through mutual friends. The two had actually grown up in the same general neighborhood but didn’t know each other, coming from very different family backgrounds and traveling in different social circles. They hit it off immediately, though, and would go on to make seven movies together (so far), three of which earned De Niro Oscar nominations.

Ironically, Mean Streets – a film meant to capture the flavor of Little Italy — was primarily shot in Los Angeles. It was cheaper to shoot interior scenes there and use New York only for the exterior ones. Scorsese wasn’t welcomed with open arms by his old neighbors, either, an insular Sicilian community who were skeptical that one of their own could be up to any good. He filmed the Little Italy scenes with a local crew consisting mostly of NYU students, who worked cheap but weren’t necessarily always reliable.

The movie was shot in the fall of 1972, edited, and then, in summer 1973, shopped around to the studios to see who might distribute it. Peter Bart, an executive at Paramount — which had just been saved from financial ruin by another Italian-Americans-with-guns drama called The Godfather — watched about 10 minutes of Mean Streets before making up his mind: he wanted nothing to do with it. Luckily, the execs at Warner Bros. had a different opinion and picked up the film. It premiered at the New York Film Festival to ecstatic reviews and audience acclaim, and opened theatrically shortly thereafter.

The movie: Harvey Keitel stars as Charlie, a young man in New York’s Little Italy who hopes to inherit his uncle’s low-level connections in organized crime. But Charlie is conflicted by his friendship with a reckless gambler named Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) and his secret relationship with Johnny’s cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson), while his Catholic upbringing hovers over everything else.

What it influenced: There have been a few direct homages to Mean Streets (Wong Kar-wai’s As Tears Go By [1988] was an unofficial remake of it), but most of the movie’s influence has been indirect. That doesn’t make it any less significant, however.

Prior to Mean Streets, Paul Schrader, who’d written the Taxi Driver screenplay and was looking to get it produced, had rejected Scorsese’s offer to direct it. His reluctance was understandable: All he knew of Scorsese’s work was Boxcar Bertha. Seeing Mean Streets made him change his mind. His producers, the husband-and-wife team of Michael and Julia Phillips, were likewise sold on Scorsese after Mean Streets.

De Niro had appeared in a handful of films before this but was basically an unknown. Mean Streets, while not a box-office success, was seen by people who recognized De Niro’s talent and helped get his career going. It was upon seeing a rough cut of Mean Streets that Scorsese’s friend Francis Ford Coppola decided he wanted De Niro to play the young Marlon Brando in The Godfather Part II (a role for which De Niro won an Oscar). Mean Streets also got De Niro the lead in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900.

Roger Ebert writes that the movie’s influence can be felt in small ways in numerous subsequent movies dealing with low-level gangsters:

“In the way it sees and hears its characters, who are based on the people Scorsese knew and grew up with in Little Italy, it was an astonishingly influential film. If Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather fixed an image of the Mafia as a shadow government, Scorsese’s Mean Streets inspired the other main line in modern gangster movies, the film of everyday reality. The Godfather was about careers. Mean Streets was about jobs. In it you can find the origins of all those other films about the criminal working class, like King of the Gypsies, Goodfellas, City of Industry, Sleepers, State of Grace, Federal Hill, Gridlock‘d, and Donnie Brasco. Great films leave their mark not only on their audiences, but on films that follow. In countless ways, right down to the detail of modern TV crime shows, Mean Streets is one of the source points of modern movies.”

What to look for: If you’ve already seen Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, in particular, you may be surprised at how raw and un-polished Mean Streets is in comparison. It was a low-budget production made by a filmmaker who was still learning what he was doing. The sound quality is often cheap, and the shots aren’t nearly as smooth as we’ve come to expect.

The film doesn’t feel as plot-driven, either, as it paints a tableau of a subsection of society rather than emphasizing a particular story line. Scorsese’s aim is to help you feel like you’re there in the barrooms and alleys and apartments with these people.

But you can also see the beginnings of the Scorsese you know and love. Most of his favorite themes are present: Catholic guilt, Italian-Americans, organized crime, New York City, Rolling Stones songs, guns, and violence.

What’s the big deal: No one claims that Mean Streets is Scorsese’s best movie, and it wasn’t his first movie, either. But its repercussions have been felt ever since it premiered. It got Scorsese’s and De Niro’s careers off the ground, separately and as collaborators, and established a realistic way for movies to look at working-class criminals: sympathetically, from the men’s point of view, and not from a moralistic high ground.

Further reading: Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, about American moviemaking in the 1970s, offers plenty of enlightenment about Mean Streets and Scorsese’s career in general.

Here is Roger Ebert’s review from 1973, and his 2003 followup.

Also of note: Vincent Canby’s rave review in The New York Times, which has at least two significant errors in it. Canby says Johnny is Teresa’s brother (they’re cousins), and he says the film was shot entirely in Little Italy (as noted, it wasn’t).

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What’s the Big Deal?: Raging Bull (1980).

What’s the Big Deal?: The Virgin Spring (1960)

One good way to make a novice horror fan’s head explode is to tell him that Wes Craven’s first film, the notoriously sleazy exploitation shocker The Last House on the Left, was based on a movie by Ingmar Bergman, the boring Swedish guy. It sounds like an absurd juxtaposition, like being told that Faces of Death was based on Shakespeare. (It wasn’t. It was based on Oscar Wilde.) But Bergman’s The Virgin Spring did indeed inspire Wes Craven, and was controversial in its own right when it came out. Why does Virgin Spring continue to interest movie buffs more than 50 years later? Let’s put a toad in a sandwich and investigate!

The praise: The film won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film (it was only the fifth year that category existed) and was also nominated for its costume design. It won the foreign-language Golden Globe as well, and received a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival.

The context: Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), the son of a stern Lutheran minister, had a lot of questions about God. For example: What’s up with God? And: What is God’s deal? Many of Bergman’s films grappled with these questions. The first such film — and the first of any of Bergman’s works to gain significant attention in the United States — was The Seventh Seal (1957), now an icon of foreign cinema. (You know the one: man plays chess with Death, etc.) This was followed by Wild Strawberries (a classic in its own right), The Magician, a couple films made for Swedish TV, and then The Virgin Spring.

Released in Sweden in February 1960 and the United States nine months later, this retelling of a 13th-century folksong was immediately controversial for its graphic depiction of a rape and murder, and for the revenge which follows it. The film was banned in some places, and in the U.S. the rape-and-murder scene was edited. Naturally, this only helped at the box office, with people going to the film just to see what all the fuss was about.

The New York Times added fuel to the fire with a disapproving review: “Mr. Bergman has stocked it with scenes of brutality that … may leave one sickened and stunned…. [The rape and murder] is a brutish and horrible offense, which Mr. Bergman has represented for all the hideousness and terror it contains.” (And this was the edited version!)

Those who have seen The Virgin Spring may be amused by that description, in much the same way that we are fascinated by our grandparents’ overreaction to Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips. By the standards of cinema in 1960 — when even married people slept in separate beds, remember, and gunfire rarely produced blood — the pivotal scene in Virgin Spring was indeed shocking. But there would be mainstream studio films by the end of that very decade that would depict rape and murder in more graphic detail, and for more prurient and salacious reasons. The Times makes it sound like Virgin Spring is some kind of grindhouse shocker, like it’s — well, like it’s The Last House on the Left.

American critics were generally kinder to Virgin Spring than the Times’ Bosley Crowther was, but Swedish commentators were dismissive. Bergman usually traded in symbolism and allusion; here, for once, everything was plain and simple (as befits the story’s folk origins), and Bergman’s countrymen were unimpressed. Moreover, Sweden in 1960 prided itself on being a modern, secular society, and the spiritual and theological issues in The Virgin Spring were embarrassingly old-fashioned.

The movie: In ye olden medieval times, a fair young maiden named Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) is traveling through the forest to a church when she’s attacked by three herdsmen. They rape and then kill her. Coincidentally, the villains later that night seek shelter at the estate of Karin’s parents (played by Max von Sydow and Birgitta Valberg), who learn what has happened to Karin and exact revenge.

What it influenced: Wes Craven’s directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), takes its basic scenario from The Virgin Spring. Craven changed the underlying ideas, though. Where Virgin Spring is concerned with questions about God’s justice and mercy, Last House on the Left acts on the assumption that God doesn’t exist, making such questions irrelevant. And so while Virgin Spring ends with Karin’s father begging God’s forgiveness for his vengeful actions against his daughter’s killers, Last House on the Left ends with the parents simply lost in the horror of what has happened. They don’t feel any moral or religious remorse, but they ain’t exactly happy, either. Virgin Spring is hopeful; Last House is nihilistic. Bergman and Craven used a common story for two very different purposes.

In addition to being remade in 2009 (with Craven serving as producer), Last House inspired plenty of copycats in the 1970s heyday of grindhouse/exploitation films: Last House on the Beach (1978), Night Train Murders (1975), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Thriller: A Cruel Picture (aka They Call Her One-Eye) (1974), and so forth. These generally played up the “sweet revenge” aspect, moving further away from the intent of Virgin Spring (which, to be fair, most of those filmmakers weren’t emulating anyway; they were looking at Last House). If Last House is the son of Virgin Spring, the Last House copycats are more like great-nephews of it.

What to look for: Though its descendants tended to be sensationalistic and cheaply made, The Virgin Spring is calm and polished, clearly the work of a serious filmmaker. (I don’t mean to detract from the merits of exploitation films; I just mean that the intentions are very different.) Bergman drew inspiration from Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), which also dealt with rape and revenge in a medieval forest. Both films employ the “Shakespearean weather change” device, where nature seems to respond to an unnatural act: the torrential rain in Rashomon, the sudden snowfall in Virgin Spring.

God is mentioned constantly throughout the film and figures prominently in the characters’ lives and motivations. Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), the pregnant, sultry servant girl, asks the Scandinavian god Odin for help in the film’s opening moments. This is followed immediately by a scene of Karin’s pious mother and somewhat reluctantly pious father praying to the Christian God. Christianity was relatively new to medieval Sweden, but it was catching on fast, and its adherents were zealous indeed. Great emphasis is placed on virginity, with Ingeri’s illegitimate pregnancy serving as a visible reminder of her sinful nature.

What’s the big deal: Bergman considered The Virgin Spring to be one of his lesser films, but it has an important place in his evolution as a storyteller. Most of his films in the 1960s would deal with similarly weighty themes of God, faith, and spirituality, and you can see him laying the groundwork for that here. The basic scenario of Virgin Spring is so primal and easily understood — revenge against those who have harmed a loved one that it fits naturally into numerous other stories told in other genres. Unlike most of those films, though, this one considers the question of whether revenge, however understandable it may be, is truly justified.

Further reading: Bosley Crowther’s appalled review in The New York Times is a good read. For contrast, here is Time magazine’s glowing approval (which mistakenly refers to Karin and Ingeri as sisters; Ingeri is clearly not a blood relation, though she may have been considered a foster child). Mark Bourne’s DVD review gives some good background too, and here is Peter Cowie’s introductory essay from the Criterion collection.

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What’s the Big Deal?: The Seventh Seal (1957).

What’s the Big Deal?: Rashomon (1950).

What’s the Big Deal?: MASH (1970)

The praise: In addition to being a box-office hit (it was the third-highest grossing film of 1970), MASH was nominated for five Oscars: best picture, director, supporting actress (Sally Kellerman), editing, and screenplay. It won for screenplay. The film also won the Golden Globe for best comedy or musical, as well as the Grand Prix at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. It ranked 56th on the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the 100 best movies ever made, and 54th on the 2007 revised list. The AFI’s list of the greatest American comedies puts MASH at No. 7, between Blazing Saddles and It Happened One Night.

The context: Kansas City native Robert Altman (1925-2006) was not quite 17 when the United States entered World War II. As soon as he was of age, he enlisted in the Army and became a co-pilot, flying bombing missions. He served for three years before returning to civilian life, where he tried his hand at publicity, writing, and eventually filmmaking. He directed industrial shorts in his hometown before going to Hollywood, where he directed TV shows (including multiple episodes of Combat!, Bonanza, The Millionaire, and U.S. Marshal) through the late 1950s and into the ’60s.

He was 45 when he made his breakthrough film, MASH, a boldly anti-Establishment, antiwar comedy that had been offered to a dozen other directors before Twentieth Century Fox gave it to him. It instantly put Altman into the ranks of respected filmmakers and led to a decade of artistic successes. In terms of box office, though, MASH was the biggest hit he would ever have.

MASH began as a novel, published in 1968 and based on author Richard Hooker’s own experiences as an Army surgeon during the Korean War. (The title M*A*S*H, with the asterisks, was used in the film’s advertising and on the subsequent TV show, but the film itself, like the book, styled it just MASH.) The screenplay was by Ring Lardner Jr., a veteran studio writer who, as one of the “Hollywood Ten,” had been blacklisted during the Red Scare of the late ’40s. MASH was only his second post-blacklist onscreen credit (1965's The Cincinnati Kid was the first), and he won an Oscar for it. He hadn’t liked the way Altman encouraged the actors to ad-lib and improvise, saying it changed too much of the script, but he doesn’t seem to have had any problem accepting the Academy Award for writing it.

Altman had already developed the animosity toward studio executives that would define his career, and he sought to make MASH with as little interference as possible. He hired mostly unknown actors (to help stay under budget) and counted on Fox’s simultaneous involvement with two bigger, more traditional war movies — Tora! Tora! Tora! and Patton — to keep them from paying attention to his offbeat little project.

His actors were another matter. Donald Sutherland (playing Hawkeye Pierce) and Elliot Gould (as Trapper John) both quickly came to the conclusion that Altman was insane and had no idea how to make a movie. They spent a good deal of time trying to have him removed from the project before finally adapting to his freewheeling style. Many of the inexperienced cast members, on the other hand, loved Altman’s emphasis on camaraderie and partying. Drug use on the set was, shall we say, condoned.

(The review in Variety made this understatement: “There is the feeling that Lardner, Altman and the actors never were agreed on what the film’s final approach should be.”)

Studio executives were horrified when they saw how Altman had combined anarchic humor with realistic operating-room gore. They were pacified only after test screenings showed that, apart from a few walkouts, audiences loved the film.

The movie: It’s the Korean War! The doctors at a mobile army surgical hospital near the front lines try to relax and keep their sanity in between patching up wounded soldiers and civilians. That’s pretty much it, plot-wise.

What it influenced: Well, there was that TV show. M*A*S*H premiered in September 1972 and ran for 11 seasons, comprising 251 episodes, before its finale in February 1983. Widely considered one of the most beloved series in TV history, it also produced two spinoffs, Trapper John, M.D. (1979-86) and AfterMASH (1983-84). Several characters from the film appeared in the TV show, but only Radar O’Reilly was played by the same actor (Gary Burghoff). There was no effort to make the TV series a direct sequel to the movie anyway, as many details about the characters’ personalities and lives were changed, and certain plot points ignored. (In the movie, Frank Burns, played by Robert Duvall, gets sent home halfway through.)

Though set during the Korean War, MASH was obviously meant as a commentary on the Vietnam War, which was fast becoming unpopular at home. A not-too-careful viewer could easily assume the film was set in Vietnam, a misconception that Altman did everything he could to exploit by removing as many specific references to Korea as possible. (The opening title cards about Korea were put in at the studio’s insistence.) The film doesn’t make any political statements about Vietnam (or Korea) specifically, but about war in general: how it’s absurd, how it’s illogical, how it mostly consists of men behaving like animals. These sentiments met a receptive audience in 1970.

The “antiwar comedy” was not exactly a robust genre. There were occasionally antiwar films, and there were comedies with military settings, but to get laughs by satirizing war was almost unheard of. (Dr. Strangelove had done it six years earlier.) To satirize war at a time when the United States was involved in one was particularly unsettling. Nor did MASH stop there. The film also made sport of belief in God, treated martial infidelity with astonishing casualness, and got laughs by having the men mercilessly abuse and harass a female officer.

Such iconoclasm and anti-authoritarian sentiment hardly feels revolutionary now — but that’s largely due to films like MASH opening the door. Mark Bourne wrote that “it’s hard for anyone too young to remember the Beatles’ breakup to watch … MASH and appreciate deep down how shocking the movie was in its time…. If its bite and sass have diminished for today’s new audiences, for whom smart-ass crassitude is as common as cornflakes, consider that a testimony to the attitude, style, and technique it pioneered and infused into American popular movies.”

You can tell it was revolutionary at the time by reading some of the contemporary reviews. In The New York Times, critic Roger Greenspun was shocked and appalled:

To my knowledge Robert Altman’s MASH is the first major American movie openly to ridicule belief in God — not phony belief; real belief. It is also one of the few (though by no means the first) American screen comedies openly to admit the cruelty of its humor. And it is at pains to blend that humor with more operating room gore than I have ever seen in any movie from any place.

All of which may promote a certain air of good feeling in the audience, an attitude of self-congratulation that they have the guts to take the gore, the inhumanity to appreciate the humor, and the sanity to admire the impiety — directed against a major who prays for himself, his Army buddies, and even “our Commander in Chief.”

Variety, meanwhile, called it “stomach-churning, gory, often tasteless, but frequently funny.”

Roger Ebert understood why the shockingly realistic blood and guts was necessary. “We can take the unusually high gore-level because it is originally part of the movie’s logic,” he wrote. “If the surgeons didn’t have to face the daily list of maimed and mutilated bodies, none of the rest of their lives would make any sense.” We have to see the horrors they see in order to appreciate — even to tolerate — the things they do in their spare time.

Ebert also observed: “Most comedies want us to laugh at things that aren’t really funny; in this one we laugh precisely because they’re not funny. We laugh, that we may not cry.” The critic in Time magazine, who loved the film, began his unsigned review with a remarkably similar sentiment: “‘And if I laugh at any mortal thing,/ Tis that I may not weep,’ wrote Byron. That philosophical fragment accounts for the duality of all black farce; looking between the cracks, one catches glimpses of hell.”

In The New Yorker, though, Pauline Kael — who would become one of the film’s most famous and most ardent supporters — just found it flat-out funny. “All the targets should be laughed at. The laughter is at the horrors and absurdities of war, and, specifically, at the people who flourish in the military bureaucracy…. Though the setting makes it seem a ‘black’ comedy, it’s a cheery ‘black’ comedy. The heroes win at everything.” Later in the review, Kael said: “I don’t know when I’ve had such a good time at the movies.” (The New Yorker, Jan. 24, 1970, p. 74.) I like to picture her and the Times’ Roger Greenspun sitting next to each other at the press screening, having opposite reactions to the movie, each wondering what was wrong with the other.

What to look for: The film has been described as “episodic” (fitting, given that it inspired 251 episodes of a TV show). Its story points come along almost in random order, with no real beginning, middle, and end like a normal story would have. There isn’t a climax, per se; a football game between the MASH unit and a rival military unit appears where most films’ climaxes would go. That in itself might be significant: This is ostensibly a war movie, and it all comes down to a violent sport played for fun.

Hawkeye, Trapper John, and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt) are irreverent in every sense of the word, showing open disdain for their religious-nut bunkmate Frank Burns and something more like pity for the harmless chaplain, Father Mulcahy (Rene Auberjonois). It seems to be these doctors’ philosophy religious faith has no place here because faith suggests an attempt at enlightenment, and war by definition cannot be made to make sense. But when the men’s sense of justice is offended, as when Burns cruelly blames a patient’s death on a young orderly, they are quick to take action.

Walter Chaw wrote a persuasive essay about the film asserting that it’s about “the cult of masculinity.” He says:

Matters of spirituality and men of the cloth are to be scoffed at while other rituals — like the rites observed in an operating theatre, or golf (a game played with clubs), or football, or the pursuit of women — are regarded with the obsessive gravity of a lower primate. It’s about male bonding, all that cruelty towards women and disrespect of authority and open racism — the game of me-against-you…. [It] may be the saddest war film ever made in that it identifies conflict as something that, however contrary to civilization, is inextricably hardwired into our bestial nature. We’re vile, stupid, ignoble apes and we aspire to ideals we’re eternally incapable of honouring.

Altman established with MASH the style he would use in virtually every film he made thereafter, with characters speaking naturalistic dialogue on top of one another. He also made good use of telephoto lenses, zooming in for close-ups in scenes that normally would have been too crowded to allow them. There are few establishing shots; we don’t ever get a sense of the layout of the camp. All of this contributes to the film’s overall sense of mayhem and anarchy, the idea that no one person is in charge, that there is no master plan.

What’s the big deal: Countercultural touchstones like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider had shown people rebelling against authority in a way that was highly appealing to a young, restless, late-1960s audience. But those movies were about outsiders, people you’d expect to defy convention. MASH was about anti-Establishment types who were actually part of the Establishment. They didn’t want to be part of it, though, and bucked against it by maintaining their ideals even when compelled to be part of the system. For a nation in the middle of a war that had already claimed the lives of thousands of unwilling participants, that was a liberating idea.

Further reading: Here are the original 1970 reviews from Variety, The New York Times, Roger Ebert, and Time magazine; here are more recent essays from DVD Journal and Film Freak Central.

Related columns:

What’s the Big Deal?: Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
What’s the Big Deal?: Easy Rider (1969).
What’s the Big Deal?: Nashville (1975).

What’s the Big Deal?: Tokyo Story (1953)

Of Tokyo Story, Roger Ebert wrote: “It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections.” Jeffrey Overstreet observed: “These characters never surprise us with anything showy, lurid, or sensational. They’re ordinary human beings, treated with fierce attention that feels like deep respect.” Philip French called it “one of the cinema’s most profound and moving studies of married love, aging and the relations between parents and children.” This is high praise for a Japanese film that the average moviegoer may not have heard of, by a director who isn’t a household name. Why does Tokyo Story win such accolades in movie-buff circles? Let’s take off our shoes by the door and investigate.

The praise: Every 10 years, the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine surveys a large, international group of critics and film experts to compile a list of the greatest films of all time. Tokyo Story appeared on the two most recent lists, at No. 3 in 1992 and No. 5 in 2002. The movie is also included on Time magazine and Empire magazine’s lists of the best films of the 20th century.

The context: Now considered one of Japan’s greatest directors, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) wasn’t well-known outside his homeland until after his death. His most acclaimed film, Tokyo Story, was made in 1953 but didn’t play in the U.S. until 1972, and it was another 20 years before it climbed onto Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade survey. Which is to say, the story behind Tokyo Story‘s notoriety is as slow-moving as the story in Tokyo Story.

Ozu started making films during the silent era, cranking out a couple dozen of them, mostly shorts, between 1927 and 1932 alone. His work in the 1930s started to move away from comedy and toward drama and social criticism, and though he wasn’t a major box-office draw, he was admired by Japanese critics. His career was interrupted by stints in the military during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, and it was after these experiences that he produced his most significant films. Pretty much everything you’ll ever read about Ozu pertains to one of the 13 movies he made between 1949 and his death in 1962. They deal primarily with ordinary human experiences like family, marriage, and death, though Ozu himself never married or had children.

Tokyo Story was conceived and produced in the same workmanlike manner as most of Ozu’s movies. He and collaborator Kogo Noda (who co-wrote half of all the films Ozu ever made) spent about 14 weeks drinking sake and writing the screenplay. This was followed by a few weeks of scouting locations, then four months of shooting and editing. Ozu used a lot of the same cast and crew from one film to the next, which helped things run smoothly. There was nothing about the project to suggest that it would come to be considered Ozu’s masterpiece; even the title was typically generic. (It was one of four Ozu films to have the word “Tokyo” in it. Other Ozu titles include Late Spring, Early Summer, Good Morning, Tokyo Twilight, The Only Son, and There Was a Father.)

Part of the reason Ozu’s movies weren’t exported to the West in the 1950s, when contemporaries like ???Akira Kurosawa were enjoying so much international success, was that Ozu didn’t make period pieces or samurai movies. Japanese distributors didn’t think movies dealing with modern, mundane Japanese life would be of interest to Western viewers, so they didn’t bother trying to export them.

As a result, when Ozu’s movies did finally reach American shores, cinephiles who were accustomed to Japanese cinema being all about geishas and samurais — because those were the only Japanese movies they’d had access to — were smitten with the sheer ordinariness of Ozu’s stories. Furthermore, Ozu’s movies made it to the U.S. at a fortuitous moment. As film scholar David Desser wrote, “That [Ozu's] films were relatively plotless and steeped in everyday life made them seem if not part of, then related to, the French New Wave or the severe style and themes of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman.” Tokyo Story fit in with the 1960s art-house style, even though it pre-dated it by more than a decade.

The movie: An elderly husband and wife take the long train journey from Onomichi to Tokyo to visit their adult children — possibly for the last time, given their advancing age and the distance between the two cities. They find that while their children are glad to see them, nobody has any time for them. It’s kind of sad.

What to look for: The films tells a seemingly ordinary story involving some seemingly ordinary people. Yet there is something strange and aloof about the way Ozu depicts it. The characters speak in a way that sounds stiff and formalized to modern, Western ears. You may wonder: Is this really how Japanese families interacted in 1953? Or is it just how Japanese movies depicted Japanese families in 1953? Would a Japanese viewer in 1953 have thought, as do we, “Man, it’s sad that these people don’t treat their parents better”? Or would the viewer have thought, “Eh, that’s how life goes”?

You’ll be glad to know that movie nerds have been discussing the answers to those questions for half a century. Ozu’s style was deliberately formal, which highlighted (and maybe exaggerated) the politeness of Japanese society. But he was also documenting the state of Japanese culture at the time, and doing so without much commentary or didacticism.

Desser writes:

“The film is, paradoxically, both intensely insular and immensely universal…. So completely does the film derive from particularities of Japanese culture — marriage, family, setting — that critics have argued over the film’s basic themes. Is it about the breakup of the traditional family in the light of postwar changes (increase urbanization and industrialization, which have led to the decline of the extended family)? Or is it about the inevitabilities of life: children growing up, getting married, moving away from home, having children of their own, leaving their aging parents behind?… Though the film is set in a specific time and place, such questions concerning the breakdown of tradition … are universal in their appeal.”

Ozu’s visual style is definitely uncommon, though — by contemporary, modern, Japanese or American standards. When a director’s visual style is noteworthy, it’s usually because of something flashy, something with pizzazz. The opposite is true with Ozu: What makes his films stand out is how calm and serene they are, yet how inviting and warm.

He shoots most scenes as if from the perspective of someone kneeling on the floor, observing the action. This came to be known as the “tatami shot,” referring to the traditional Japanese mat. The camera doesn’t tilt upward, though. It remains level, looking straight ahead, and it almost never moves. (Roger Ebert says the camera moves only once in Tokyo Story, and that this is “more than usual” for an Ozu film.)

When characters have conversations, Ozu will often have them look almost directly at the camera, as if we are the other person. Then he’ll cut to the other character making his or her reply, also looking at the camera. Even a casual moviegoer will notice that this is different from the usual method of portraying conversations in film. If the tatami shots make us feel like quiet, unnoticed observers, these dialogue shots draw us in, make us part of the action.

Notice also how Ozu will linger on a room (and a scene) after the characters have exited, or cut to it before they arrive. In The New York Times, Roger Greenspun described this as “an acknowledgment that places are sanctified by people and that even when they have gone away, a bit of their presence lingers on.”

The effect of all these devices: it almost feels like we’re living in this world with these characters, kneeling on their floors, having conversations with them, witnessing their lives.

What’s the big deal: Ozu’s visual style suits his material perfectly. If he had been making samurai movies or slapstick comedies, obviously he’d have approached them differently. This matching of content and style is a crucial element of effective filmmaking, and one that’s not easy to achieve. The fact that the characters’ lives are not extraordinary is part of the point. Ozu wants us to relate to them somehow, to see ourselves and the people we know reflected on the screen. One of the reasons the film has endured is that it has accomplished this for so many people over so many years. We may live half a century and half a world away from the story, but we can probably identify with many of its elements. Considering how few films have any emotional resonance at all, let alone resonance that spans time and cultural barriers, that’s kind of a Big Deal.

Further reading: David Desser’s essay, “A Filmmaker for All Seasons,” was reprinted in the book Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, but you can read it online here. You may want to skip the first three paragraphs if you haven’t seen the movie yet, as they lay out the entire plot from beginning to end. As mentioned, the story isn’t exactly the point of the film, but it still might be nice for you not to know exactly what happens beforehand.

Here is Roger Ebert’s review from the film’s 1972 American release, and his 2003 Great Movies essay, both of which likewise discuss the plot in detail. David Bordwell’s Criterion essay is also a good overview.