[There] is in Brewster McCloud and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, as well as in That Cold Day in the Park and M∗A∗S∗H, an underlying view of life and the world which, bypassing differences in subject matter, links these four films together as the work of a consistently serious and perceptive critic of certain conditions of contemporary society…. In the four films which are the subject of this study, Altman reserves his strongest disapproval and censure for those characters who, rather than maintaining their freedom of choice and action and a flexibility which permits them to alter their conduct according to the contingencies of a given situation, fall back on a structure, an established set of values, which, whether self-invented and self-imposed or applied by some outside agency and found to be acceptable by the characters involved, causes them to lose their options, become fixed in...