When I was in college, shortly after it came out, they used to show movies in the cafeteria once a month on Saturday night. One month they showed MASH, and when this bit of dialogue came up
the entire audience broke out in cheers and laughter.
It wasn’t considered very naughty at all. It’s pretty standard-issue military humor, with a very little bit of sex. Obviously the suicide bit was unusual, and well done (“Black capsule?”); I don’t remember much of a fuss about it though.
All I remember is that my parents would not let me see it. Way too racy. They also wouldn’t let me see The Godfather, The Exorcist, and Papillon. I went and saw Jaws without their permission, and they were a little pissed.
I’d heard about the shower scene and when I saw it, realized it may have been shocking in its day, but didn’t seem all that bad in the present.
The thing that really surprised me was finding out what the name “Hot Lips” really referred to, since the only thing I’d ever seen was the TV show! If the series ever made reference to the actual meaning of the nickname, I must have missed it.
I think one of the most “shocking” things was the use of the word “fuck” during the football game (John Schuck, to the opposong lineman: “All right, Bub, your fuckin’ head is coming right off!”).
According to imdb, it was the first use of the word “fuck” in a major motion picture.
Is that like Dr. Long John?
Roddy
I was in Japan when MASH was released and it played on the Air Force bases to packed houses of GIs, I know that much. I was all set to go see it when my dad figured out it had profanity and a bit of nudity in it and put the kibosh on it.
Are they ever going to stop bleeping that on TV?
"G-- damn censorship!
G-- damn censorship bleeps!"
I am just a hair too young to have been caught up in all that 60’s stuff. When I first saw the film in the late 70’s, it got a “meh” from me. (And still does. Sorry.)
I guess you had to be there, at that “right” time, to get a different impact from the film.
I remember that we thought we were the first free love generation and that we were most willing to not allow anything to shock us.
My husband and I saw “MAS*H” in the post theater at Ft. Lewis, Washington and, I don’t know if this still holds or not, but at that time the theater audience had to rise for the “Star Spangled Banner” prior to the showing of the film of the evening. So imagine my (well-disguised) shock at the anti-military complex theme of the movie. This was compounded by the young private in front of us wearing a FTA patch sewn on the seater of his civvies. What a dutiful bunch of little subverters we were!
So, no, can’t say the sexual references in the movie were as provocative as the rather large public no-no of thumbing our collective noses at Uncle Sam. While nurtured under his tender care, no less. With his permission, of course. 
The movie still makes me chortle with hippy-dippy adolescent glee.
I can remember the first time I saw it, on the CBC, late night, one summer evening, about 1975 or so.
CBC was very edgy in those days – “Look mom, no bleeps!”
Seems to me that he commercials were kept to a minimum for that showing, too.
.
What’s an FTA patch (asks the kid who was five in 1970)?
Fuck The Army
I was a teen and it wasn’t shocking. Think of all the hippies and what was going on. Television was all cop shows and I’d seen a ton of war footage every night on the news. A person born decades earlier than me might have been offended. It wasn’t bad for the teens though.
This is what I came to post. All the sex, nudity, drug use and anti-war subversiveness was standard fare for the late 60s, and nothing much. But an F-bomb was new.
Elliot Gould’s Trapper John was my touchstone for the definition of Cool for my young adulthood. I grew a mustache because of him.
I think the real controversial films were a couple years earlier with the expiration of the Hayes code and the emergence of the ratings system (G,M,R,X). I remember a “Reader’s Digest” article where the author (could have been James Michener but don’t hold me to it) complained about going to see a family movie with his children and seeing previews of “Blow Up” with naked Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills cavorting with David Hemmings). There was criticism of “The Graduate” with Anne Bancroft appearing naked before a much younger Dustin Hoffman and telling him she’d sleep with him anytime. The author recognized the need for more mature films but felt they should not be sprung on an unsuspecting audience. There was another RD article critical of one movie chain (Walter Reade?) that let unsuspecting children in to be badly frightened by “Night of the Living Dead”. By the time “MASH” and “Catch-22” (with the great scene of Paula Prentiss full-frontal nudity) came out there was a ratings system in so movie audiences were informed about what they were seeing. That muted some of the criticism.
In short maybe it had an arched eyebrow. But not real shocking.
Since MAS*H was anti-war already, it was doing the protests for us.
US Air Force -Japan must have been a lot more accepting of alternative vision than was US Army-Europe. The move was flat banned from European base theaters. That may have been a decision made by the PX theater service but I can’t help but think somebody with a whole bunch of stars on their shoulders down at Heidelberg had a hand in it.
Mrs. G and I took a weekend pass to drive to Paris to see it – in English with French subtitles. We had a great time. The theater was so crowded that we were sitting on jump seats in the isle but we, with a scattering of other US service people, were laughing way ahead of the rest of the crowd.
Yea, for its time it was pretty much over the line. The other big movies were flag waiving fests like Patton and John Wayne’s Green Berets, which the PX Theaters and the Army thoroughly approved of. The whole thing was pretty obviously a commentary on Vietnam, not Korea or the general futility and stupidity of war and war making organizations.
I am officially a geezer.
I saw it on the same double feature. At the time Patton was being marketed as an anti-war movie, so maybe they thought this spin would be more convincing when shown with MASH. Patton is a great movie, and an excellent bio-flick, but anti-war? I don’t think so. My father was in an Armored Division in the War which served under Patton for a time, and Patton was the only general he ever mentioned - and mentioned favorably also. He never considered it anti-war at all.
M.A.S.H. (anti-war) and Patton (pro-war) were both up for Oscars that year. Lines were drawn, feelings were all riled up between the filthy hippies and the god-fearin’ Amurrican patriots. I remember THAT very well indeed. As for M.A.S.H. being dirty/naughty, not a bit! - maybe edgy, the way it was all irreverent and stickin’ it to the man. But what could you expect from those filthy hippies? Nah, the Patton lovers went to see Patton and paid no attention to the communist anti-war group. It would have been beneath them.