Word: goulding
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...colonialism, depends for its power on dividing the people and maintaining a "community of individuals" who fear and distrust each other, where each of the oppressed also acts as oppressor. Semiradical films like Getting Straight and M*A*S*H work to sustain this reactionary disunity, for when Elliott Gould comes on with a cute male-chauvinist line, putting down women and smoothing it all over with a few chuckles, he contributes to the process of syncretism. Individual alienation is cemented into group consciousness, resulting in a general subservience and thought-control, keeping us together by keeping us apart...
...give back the red man, the black man, the yel-???v man, his land, his freedom... but then who would play the inferior enemy in the western, the war film, who would say "bwana" on safari? They would like to see sexual equilibrium. But then would could tolerate Eliot Gould's lines in Getting Straight: "She's a good scientist, lousy lay"; Candice Bergen's lines, "I didn't even feel like a date-you didn't buy me popcorn" or anonymous gems: "Women have that charming ability to adapt to whatever man they're with...
...been fired by Jack Warner and tangled with a lot of lesser producers. Richard Zanuck, chief of 20th Century-Fox, says that he would never have hired Altman for his last picture if he had known that Altman had previously made That Cold Day in the Park. Elliott Gould compared Altman to General Custer: "He always seemed on the verge of some sort of external defeat." But since his last stand, no one is bad-mouthing Bob Altman, least of all Zanuck, Fox or Gould. The picture was M*A*S*H, and it is one of the runaway hits...
That sort of creative chaos drove M*A*S*H's two name players, Gould and Donald Sutherland, up and practically over the wall. "I told them," Altman recalls, "that there were going to be no movie stars. I told them of my improvisational philosophy, and they got a little bugged when they saw it happening." Sutherland says, "I never understood exactly what he wanted." They watched Altman make some improvements, like building Hot Lips' part up from a nine-line bit, but the master stroke of adding the loudspeaker as a character came only in Altman...
Perhaps the most blatant pitch in a movie of this sort, is the Strawberry Statement, even though the movie does not star Elliot Gould. It is scantily-written and over-directed in a cinema gullibilite style. Director Stuart Hagmann has taken a heavy hand in his zooms, tracking shots, cuts, and dissolves in a desperate attempt to obscure the transparency of Israel Horovitz's script. Horovitz himself is a very concerned, intelligent man, and even makes a cameo appearance in this movie, but his screenplay has little of the punch of his plays like Rats, or The Indian Wants...