January 25, 1970: The Film Version of "M*A*S*H" Has Hollywood's 1st F-Word

Left to right: Donald Sutherland, Sally Kellerman, Elliott Gould

January 25, 1970: The film M*A*S*H premieres, directed by Robert Altman, on a screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr., based on the novel by Richard Hooker. It was the pen name of Richard Hornberger, who really was a surgeon from Maine, and was basically a thinly-veiled memoir of his time at a real Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Korean War.

The only actors who played the same characters in the 1972-73 TV show were Gary Burghoff as the company clerk, Corporal Walter "Radar" O'Reilly; and George Wood (for some reason, billed as "G. Wood") as General Charlie Hammond. Corey Fischer and former NFL player Timmy Brown (credited as an actor as "Timothy Brown") were in both, but as different characters. Also in it from the ranks of pro football were Ben Davidson and Fred "the Hammer" Williamson.

There were a lot of differences, and not just having Donald Sutherland as Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, Elliott Gould as Captain "Trapper" John McIntyre, Robert Duvall as Major Frank Burns, and, perhaps most shocking of all, René Auberjonois (yes, Clayton from Benson and Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) as Father Mulcahy.

For one thing, the movie opens with the famous theme song, complete with sung lyrics: "Suicide Is Painless." For another, for the TV show, the character of Captain Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt) was dropped. For another, "Dish" was the nickname of Lieutenant Maria Schneider (Jo Ann Pflug), whereas on the show, the character was renamed Lt. Maggie Dish (and, as played by Karen Philipp, was quickly dropped).

For yet another, while fooling around with Frank, the head nurse, Major Margaret Houlihan, inadvertently gives herself the nickname "Hot Lips." On the show, she already had the nickname when she got there. Sally Kellerman (movie) and Loretta Swit (TV show) are the same age, and they didn't look much alike then, but they did once they got older. Roger Bowen played the bedraggled commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake.

Bobby Troup, who wrote the song "Route 66" and played Dr. Joe Early on Emergency!, played Sgt. Gorman. Sylvester Stallone, although not credited, played a soldier. And John Schuck, as dentist Walter "the Painless Pole" Waldowski, utters the first F-word in a major Hollywood release. It came during the football game near the end of the film. Screenwriter Andy Sidaris told Schuck to look at the player across from him, and, "Say something that'll annoy him." He said, "All right, Bud, your fucking head is coming right off!" 

The new film rating system had officially replaced the puritanical Hays Code on November 1, 1968, just a little over a year earlier. The line was allowed into the film, which got an "R" rating. The rules would later be rewritten so that the word could appear in a film once, and it could keep a "PG" rating; but a 2nd use meant an "R."

The TV show took a few liberties with language. The episode "The Interview," intended to mimic a 1950s TV documentary, had the reporter/narrator, Clete Roberts, say, "Some of their saltier comments have been deleted." As Hawkeye, Alan Alda said, "I don't really give a shit what happens," and said that he'd written President Harry S Truman, himself a practitioner of earthy language, and said, "The least he could do was call me a son of a bitch." And as Blake's successor, Colonel Sherman Potter, Harry Morgan used the term "Bullshit." All three examples were bleeped. Only Potter apologized to Roberts (and, by extension, to the documentary's viewers).

M*A*S*H the TV show, running from 1972 to 1983, used the words "hell" and "damn" more than any TV show before it, to the point where Radar told Blake following a brush with death, his language would contain "no more hells, damns, and especially not the big one!" And there were 3 uses, 2 by Hawkeye, of "You son of a bitch!"

But no F-word. There was a scene at the end of a Season 1 episode, "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet," where this sequence occurred:

Hawkeye: Henry, I know why I'm crying. Tommy was my friend, and now, he's dead, and I'm crying. I've watched guys die in there every day. Why didn't I ever cry over them?

Henry: Because you're a doctor.

Hawkeye: What the hell does that mean?

Henry: I don't know. If I knew that, I'd be at the Mayo Clinic. Does this place look like the Mayo Clinic?

In hindsight, I have to think that, were M*A*S*H to be rebooted as "prestige TV," that episode would have been made exactly as before, with the addition of an F-word in that sequence: "Does this fucking place... " or "Does this place look like the fucking Mayo Clinic?"

At any rate: From the M*A*S*H film, Roger Bowen died in 1996 (by a weird coincidence, just 1 day after Henry's TV portrayer, McLean Stevenson), Richard Hornberger (Hooker) in 1997, Bobby Troup in 1999, George Wood and Ring Lardner Jr. (the last survivor of the Hollywood Ten) in 2000, Robert Altman in 2006, Ben Davidson in 2012, René Auberjonois in 2019, and Timothy Brown in 2020.

As of January 25, 2022, Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, Tom Skerritt, Robert Duvall, Sally Kellerman, Gary Burghoff, John Schuck, Fred Williamson and Jo Ann Pflug are still alive. (UPDATE: Kellerman died in 2022, just a few days after this post; Sutherland in 2024, Duvall in 2026.)

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January 25, 1970 was a Sunday -- an unusual day of the week to release a film, in any era. Baseball was out of season. Football season ended 2 weeks earlier, with the Kansas City Chiefs winning Super Bowl IV over the Minnesota Vikings.

There were 6 games in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the Boston Celtics, 102-96 at the Boston Garden.

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the San Diego Rockets, 159-131 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. Archie Clark scored 36 points for the Sixers.

* The Milwaukee Bucks beat the Atlanta Hawks, 131-116 at the Alexander Memorial Coliseum (now the Hank McCamish Pavilion) in Atlanta. Flynn Robinson scored 33 for the Bucks.

* The Cincinnati Royals beat the Baltimore Bullets, 129-122 at the Cincinnati Gardens. Oscar Robertson scored 41 points.

* The Chicago Bulls beat the Detroit Pistons, 120-111 at the Chicago Stadium.

* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Phoenix Suns, 118-106 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California. Jerry West scored 38. Wilt Chamberlain did not play.

There were 4 games in the American Basketball Association:

* The New York Nets beat the Indiana Pacers, 96-83 at the Island Garden in West Hempstead, Long Island, New York.

* The Pittsburgh Pipers beat the Carolina Cougars, 108-101 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.

* The Washington Capitols beat the Miami Floridians, 113-106 in the gymnasium at North Dade Junior College North in Miami.

* And the Denver Rockets, the team that would become the Denver Nuggets, beat the Dallas Chaparrals, the team that would become the San Antonio Spurs, 127-118 at the Denver Auditorium Arena.

And there were 6 games in the NHL:

* The New York Rangers beat the Los Angeles Kings, 3-2 at Madison Square Garden.

* The Boston Bruins beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 3-1 at the Boston Garden. Yes, it hosted the Celtics and the Bruins on the same day.

* The Philadelphia Flyers beat the St. Louis Blues, 2-0 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.

* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Detroit Red Wings, 4-1 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

* The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 3-2 at the Chicago Stadium.

* And the Oakland Seals beat the Minnesota North Stars, 4-1 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.