Awards presented April 15, 1971
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
Patton. Somehow, in the midst of the intense protests against the Vietnam War, Hollywood managed to make a war movie that both hawks and doves liked, the former because they saw the film as a glorification of an American general, the latter because they saw it as portraying him as the kind of nut who was causing people to die in Southeast Asia. It's big, sweeping, and effective, but it breaks no new ground for either the war movie or the biopic.
... when it should have gone to ...
The TV series was de-fanged and bowdlerized, but it has nevertheless eclipsed the movie in popular culture. Which is a pity, because the movie was a fresh and astonishing new take on an old genre, the service comedy -- which the TV series quickly became. It also catapulted its director, Robert Altman, to success as an auteur. It was a truly subversive film not only in that it was clearly more about the folly of Vietnam than about its Korean War setting, but also because its hip attitudes, its blending of farce and violence, and its wildly overlapping dialogue shocked the Hollywood old guard, particularly Darryl F. Zanuck, whose studio, 20th Century-Fox, released it without much hope for its success. Seen today, some of its sexist frat-boy humor is a little grating, and some bad movies, such as the
Porky's and
Police Academy series, resulted from imitating
MASH's attitudes. But at its best, the movie has real bite: Compare, for example, the creepy religious fanaticism of Robert Duvall's Major Burns to the priggish dweeb played by Larry Linville on TV.
No comments:
Post a Comment