With the release of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H in 1970, a new form of comedy was brought to the big screen that would forever change the face of cinema. Based on the novel by Richard Hooker, M*A*S*H follows a group of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital officers as they perform surgery and pass the time just miles from the front lines of the Korean Conflict. Led by the sardonic Captains "Hawkeye" Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and "Trapper" John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), the film has the feel of an absurd three-ring circus, and is composed of a series of vignettes rather than a traditionally unfolding narrative. Thrown into the mix are the religious Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), Captain "Duke" Forest (Tom Skerritt), Father "Dago Red" Mulcahy (Rene Auberjonois), Captain "Painless" Walt Waldowski (John Schuck), and many more. Altman's insistence on overlapping characters' dialogue, photographing the film with fog filters and sloppy zooms, and frank combination of jarringly graphic surgery footage with cynical humor resulted in a timeless comedy that reflects the American counterculture's growing distrust of religion and government in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Politics aside, M*A*S*H remains a brutal and hysterically-toned motion picture that skyrocketed Altman to the upper ranks of Hollywood directors, after decades of working in documentaries and television.