10 Movie Scenes That Would Never Have Been Shot Today
3. M*A*S*H Humilates A Woman Via Shower Exposure
The quiet brilliance of Robert Altman's M*A*S*H is how matter-of-factly Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and his partner in crime Trapper John (Elliot Gould, aka The Living Embodiment of the 1970s) pull outlandish, meaningless pranks, drink to excess and all the while operating on living, bleeding soldiers during the Korean War.
This was Altman's Korea, not the toned-down, laugh-track-infused sitcom created by noted hack Larry Gelbart (a man who Alan Alda himself despised for his self-righteousness). It was the true horrors of the battlefield staffed by able-bodied surgeons who operated under dire conditions - what the hell else would they do with their spare time.
So casual and matter-of-factly the world around them moves, when Hawkeye is notified that he can go home again, it's but a brief glimpse of homecoming - just something else that happened in the day.
Nevertheless, it was also the raunchy 70s, and slut-shaming was always on the table. Take, if you will the moment when Sutherland and Gould gather the entire squad around a latrine, only to pull up the tent and reveal the nude, showering body of the hard-nosed Margaret Houlihan. There's nothing redeeming about what they do, but then again, there was nothing redeeming about the actual war (Vietnam) for which Korea substituted itself.