Mash (as I'll call [M∗A∗S∗H] for short) is a comedy at which you may very well do not just a double but a quadruple take…. (p. 38)

What makes Mash outstanding—and as something more than a wacky comedy—is the richness of its texture. The characters stroll, run, interweave among the tents of their unit; dust swirls around them; the camera pans and cuts to seemingly random details. Meanwhile, on the sound track, lines of dialogue overlap or are casually tossed away; the PA system continually breaks in with an odd announcement or the Japanese version of an American popular song. Many films these days impose quick cuts and overlapping dialogue on what are basically four-square, linear scripts, and thus produce an irritating effect of contrivance. Mash stands out because—with the exception of the fake suicide and Japanese sequences …—the incidents and dialogue in...