I think that this is a big part of it.
No, I don’t think she was particularly attractive. She was the one female in the opening credits, so by TV conventions, she had to be the object of desire for males on the show. But I highly doubt there were too many real men who thought her very highly desireable (i.e., “hot”).
MASH* Season 9, Episode 11 "No Sweat ". (Hot Lips gets a case of prickly heat.)
Re-watch that episode and then tell me she’s not hot.
Well, in that episode she definitely is, though in a slightly different sense of the word.
Not attractive…but I thought that was always just me being a different generation. Same as with Miss Tessmacher in the Superman movies… she’s not hot at all, she looks like someone’s barfly mom–I just assumed that adult men in the late 70s liked that look.
I think she was hot enough to fit the character, and to make it plausible that men, especially men in a combat zone, would fall for her. OTOH the character changed so radically from the first of the series to the end that it makes less sense to talk about what fit the character. She started out a figure of mockery as in the movie, and then transformed into a sensitive saint like the rest of the cast as it turned into the Alan Alda show.
I liked the show very much, but even characters who stayed with the show altered completely.
Regards,
Shodan
Loretta Swit was a perfectly nice looking woman. She just wasn’t very believable as a seductive siren.
ONLY in a war zone where there were very few other women around would anyone have called her “Hot Lips.”
I’m not really following.
She was never supposed to be a seductive siren. And she originally got the name Hot Lips (from the movie) as a way of mocking her. At the time, she was considered attractive but an uptight bitch. Hawkeye called her a ‘regular army clown’. She grew to relax a bit and accepted the name.
Yes, attractive - although not really my type, and the brassiness/pomposity of the character was a bit of a turnoff, too.
The point wasn’t that she was a bombshell, but that she *thought *she was above average and that she had the hots for Frank. I actually read the book and there was nothing there that claimed she was a bombshell, though there was enough to imply that she had a good body (which Swit could claim). The rest was smoke and mirrors.
She was very occasionally hot early on in the show, but mostly not. Well, at least, not particularly hot for the age she was supposed to be. I thought she always looked like she was in her 30s.
If she was supposed to be super hot, they shouldn’t have shown so many more women, like the ones Hawkeye would (try to) date.
Concur with the majority. Not entirely unattractive, but not what I’d call hot. She looked her best with the anachronistic '80s fluffy hairdo.
The first time I saw Swit was as the telephone operator on Hawaii Five-O who fell in love with Ed Flanders. At the time, my mother speculated she was the daughter of Kathleen Freeman, based on their facial resemblance.
She was far from the “only” female in MASH’s opening credits; she was just the only one identified by name. As far as I’m concerned, the running blonde biting her lower lip was the hottest one of the bunch.
With respect to Barbara Bain, she played a Russian spy in an episode of Dobie Gillis and an old girlfriend of Rob’s in The Dick van Dyke Show. Both times, she came across as quite hot! She seemed cold and one-dimensional on Mission: Impossible and Space: 1999 because that’s the way her characters were written and the episodes were directed. On MI in particular, she was supposed to be “sexy but sophisticated.”
terentii:
I don’t mean the only one depicted in the credits scene (running to the helicopter, getting patients down the hill), I mean the only female billed as one of the show’s starring cast. That’s what I mean by credits.
Thanks for the input. It still bewilders me how she was cast as “the ugly one” on Mission: Impossible with minimal makeup and hair differences from her early MASH* years, especially when the women she was comparing herself to weren’t exactly Swimsuit Issue material. I guess that’s Hollywood Ugly for you.
Hot Lips Houlihan was hot because she was a some what attractive and horny woman in a mostly male military camp. Houilihan would have been just another ER nurse in civilian life. Houilihan would not have a bunch of guys chasing her in civilian life.
They cast Kellerman and Swit because they weren’t the typical beautiful starlet. They looked ok but not stunning.
I loved the Hot Lips character in the movie. A female version of Hawkeye. Raunchy, horny and could drink with the guys. She was way over sanitized for the tv show.
Yeah. If you remember (and it seems you do) Kellerman wore thigh-highs and garters. She was all woman and she strutted her stuff more than Swit ever did. She was obviously watered down for TV, but they removed a lot of the character’s visual sexual cues also, which really changed her overall look.
Yeah, the “Hot Lips” moniker wasn’t about physical attractiveness - it was about her putting out.
For those that don’t know, she got the nickname because Pierce and McIntire recorded one of her lovemaking sessions with Frank and broadcast it to the camp, and in the audio she says, “Oh, Frank! My lips are hot!” Thus, Hot Lips.
She was known as an easy mark for any officer who outranked her, and it was clear that she had casual dalliances with any general who felt like bedding her, even while she was an ‘item’ with Frank.
That said, and considering that she was in her late 30’s - early 40’s for most of the run of that show (and her character would have been roughly that old on the show, being a major and all), she was hot enough.
Now, Sally Kellerman is a ‘hot lips’ who was totally not hot. In a hotness showdown I’d pick Loretta Swit over her any day. It’s not that Kellerman is ugly or anything. She’s just kind of gangly and vaguely masculine or something.
Early in the show’s run there were a number of billed female co-stars who played nurses in the camp and got a fair amount of air time - especially in the first year.
Marcia Strassman, who played nurse Margie Cutler, and who went on to be Gabe Kaplan’s wife on “Welcome Back Kotter” was in six episodes in the first season. She was also way hotter than Hot Lips, but also much younger.
Odessa Cleveland played Nurse Ginger Ballis, was close to a regular cast member, appearing in 19 episodes in the first two seasons.
Kellye Nakahara played Nurse Kelly, and was a supporting actor throughout the almost the entire show, putting her into a category with only a handful of actors in terms of how long she was on the show (she was on the show from season 2 all the way through to the end. She had 44 credited appearances, and dozens on non-credited appearance. I assume the non-credited ones were because she didn’t have a speaking part but was just in the background. Towards the end of the season she even got some major plot elements centered around her.
She was, however, not hot.
Yes she is, at times when she plays a childish helpless little girl. I remember the M.A.S.H. episode when a commie hunter accused her, and one with senior officer.
They would know if they read post #13. 