As JRDelirious points out the TV Frank Burns was not a career Army officer, any more than Henry Blake or Hawkeye was. They were all civilian doctors who had been assigned various ranks and corresponding levels of authority and responsibility. I always felt a lot of sympathy for the Henry character, he certainly never asked to be Colonel of a MASH unit.
Frank Burns was a lipless wonder!
And remember, Hot Lips could never love a man she outranked. At the 4077th that limited her choices to Frank or Henry.
I remember that episode. Winchester’s family had a tradition that the Christmas gift had to be given anonymously, so everyone else was mad at him, because they thought he wasn’t contributing anything for the children.
I remember an episode when his surgery saved a soldier’s life, but left his right arm slightly disabled. The soldier turned out to be a concert pianist, and was extremely unhappy that his career was over. So Winchester sent for sheet music for several one-handed piano pieces, telling the soldier that he could still play.
In the 7th/8th seasons, there was a recurring enllisted character name Jerry (or Jack) Scully, played by Joshua Bryant, to whom Houlihan was attracted.
I think Kunilou is referring to Scully, albeit indirectly, since the affair between him and Margaret crashed & burned in short order.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but I remember that Burn’s father was a surgeon and somehow he got Frank through some second rate medical school so his son could intern with him. Frank thought that made him better than Hawkeye, who went to Harvard and interned and did his surgical residency at Boston General.
Nitpick: It was music for **left-**handed pieces.
Actually it was a reference to Margaret’s marriage to Donald Penobscott. Potter (who, as Margaret’s commanding officer, had to grant permission for her to marry) was reviewing Penobscott’s personnel file.
“Ah. Lieutenant Colonel, I see.”
“Yes sir. I could never love a man I outranked.”
Of course, that was still in the Hot Lips era of Margaret’s character. Scully came along several seasons later, after the producers made her less of a cartoon.
Ahh…but didn’t the affair crash and burn because Scully got himself demoted for telling an officer to go screw himself?
Margaret didn’t like that…of course, it was even worse when he told her he thought that she wasn’t a “real” Major - she was just made a Major so she could boss around other nurses.
-Joe
I vastly prefer the Burns episodes (pre-Potter) because they were funny. Sure, he was a caricature, but the show was a comedy first, anti-war treatise second. Winchester may have been a better foil and more complex character, but the show had assumed such a huge sense of self-importance by then that the shows stopped being very funny. Either there were Mediocre Hijinks (which coudn’t hold a candle to the hijinks from the first few seasons), or there was Message Mode, which got tiresome quickly. I can’t blame Swit for wanting a more well-rounded character (it’d be thankless to play the same ninny for so long), but she stopped being funny after Frank left. For some comedies, I’ll take “funny” over “human”–especially since the first few seasons had plenty of anti-war jibes that were integrated into the fabric of the environment without having these heavy-handed brushstrokes dominating the episodes. Just my $0.02.
I read somewhere that "the most depraved lunatic in creation has SOME lucid moments. This was certainly true of Frank Burns:
- His suspicion of the Koreans burying something (as mentioned above) Sure. I’d be suspicious, too–but I wouldn’t check my toothpaste for explosives!
- His cutting remark to Margaret “I don’t know–I think a little youth would be nice for a change!” This was a deep stab at Margaret, who, of course, was more mature than the lieutenants and captains she had command over. And Frank knew it. After Margaret left the table in embarrassment, Frank snickered to Hunnicutt, “Boy, I got her that time, didn’t I?” You sure did, Frank.
- When the MAS*H people were entertaining themselves during the interruptions to the faulty showing of the movie in “Movie Tonight,” Frank joined with the others in mimicking Mulcahy: “The post-op is collapsing and your ward’s on fire!”
- At least one episode in which Frank bested Hawkeye (or at least stayed even with him, which was hard enough) in the practical-joke department.
- The episode “Abyssinia, Henry,” when McLean Stevenson left the series; the camera pointed at Linville, who was as shocked as the others…
- In “Private Charles Lamb.” The Greek soldiers had an Easter festival, and cordially invited Frank to join in, which he did.
As for Winchester, he certainly showed his human side: - In the final episode. He lost his love of music when the Chinese musicians were senselessly killed. He smashed his Mozart record.
- When the kids sent members of the 4077th letters. Winchester’s aloofness disappeared, thanks to a sweet little girl who melted his heart with “I’m sending you a leaf from a birch tree. I hope you like it.” Chawles wrote a very proper and kind reply to the child.
- When Chawles scorned the Korean surgeons who were visiting, as “Larry, Moe, and Curly,” and they were vindicated. They taunted him with “Not quite the Three Stooges, are we?” and Potter said, “Major, I think you’re due for a generous serving of crow!” Chawles was contrite.
- Winchester’s disdain for the paranoid Colonel Flagg (“I will criticize Pierce; I will ridicule him, I will even humiliate him, but I will not spy on him!”) The “information” Chawles gave Flagg tricked the colonel into breaking in on a card game Potter was having with civilians, and Flagg fell for it hook, line, and sinker, showing Chawles certainly had a high-minded attitude…
Oh, boy, I agree with this. Her character improved mightily once Frank was gone. Her going for that stooge made HER into a characature as well. To me, the “real” Margaret was so much more woman than that. She was smart, a career woman ahead of her time, she was strong but wanted to sometimes be soft, she wanted to be one of the boys but she didn’t want to stoop to their level. She certainly was too terrific of a person to be fooling around with some married guy who didn’t even seem to respect her as a human being. I was always glad that Frank left, so there could be a female regular on the show that you could respect as an Army officer and a person.
I can’t stand the concept of the “designated bad guy”.
And I couldn’t stand the character of Frank Burns. Sure, he was hateful, sure he was incompetant, sure he was a jerk, a crybaby, a martinet, a hypocrite, all that. Except he only acted that way because the writers made him act that way. We were invited to hate Burns because he was hateful…b
A bad guy in a recurring series shouldn’t be just a cartoon bad guy. The comparisons with the WKRP characters is on point. Herb, Les, the Big Guy, the Big Guy’s mother, all of them could serve as foils for the “good guys”. But these characters were believable as stuffed shirt, weasel, idiot, and schemer respectively.
I could believe in an incompetant martinet doctor character…but I can’t believe the Frank Burns character.
They both sucked.
I suppose they initially just went for the pairing of Margaret/Frank from the movie, in which the two majors are initially stuffy "Regulars"that you could have found among the upper ranks of Catch-22, and Margaret is not that smart.
Yeah, but that just shows that if Frank were around today, he’d be working for TSA.
That’s not by accident, either. The novel owes a debt to Heller that makes your student loans look like pocket change. Richard Hooker actually wound up being very critical of the show’s politics. His characters were not really political radicals; they were overannuated college boys who did their best to live it up the way they would back in the States. I believe Hawkeye and Trapper were both football players in college.
I used to hate Frank but now I just feel nothing but sympathy. Maybe it’s because of the way I can’t stop analyzing really mean characters. But there is another time Frank showed his humanity:
Margaret had just gotten married and was leaving for her honeymoon. Everybody waves her goodbye and then goes back to the camp. Frank is the only one standing there and quietly says, “Goodbye Margaret” while he watches the helicoptor leave. That part always makes me sad.
True. The 4077 in the movie MASH and during the first few years of the TV series was very much a frathouse environment.
In the book Hawkeye was not opposed at all to weapons. In fact, they got rid of their first chaplain, “Shaking Sammy”, by driving him out of town and then shooting out the tires on his jeep with their .45’s. And of course, they also crucified him.
MASH the TV series was nothing at all like the book. In fact, it was diametrically opposed to it. Richard Hooker hated the ‘liberal’ Hawkeye and BJ.