Robert Altman fit none of these molds, just as he never managed to conform to the image of a Hollywood director. At school he was not much taken with anything except pranks and mischief. He liked to have a good time and he enjoyed the facilities of that philosophy--a little booze, some girls, late nights, and spare time. He had an instinct for moviemaking, proved on training films at Calvin, and occasionally he decided that he really ought to try Hollywood. But several visits in the post war years came to nothing. He was busy and well-intentioned, but sort of aimless--is it possible that he never took himself that seriously? A few years later, he admitted that "I started in the film business not too long ago, right here on this soundstage. It was a stormy beginning, and as I remember, I was in such a hurry to ‘make it’ that I often forgot to stand still long enough to do what it was I was trying to do. I’m not sure--even today--that I knew what it was I was trying to do, but I do know that I tried very, very hard, and ran around and around my goal until either I or it became like tigers turning into a circle of melted butter. And never once stopping to wonder what it was I was chasing--or was it, by then, chasing me."

Ambition in movies was supposed to be more sharply focused, but Altman seemed to exist in his own haze. Gradually, during the 1950s and early 1960s, he gathered real credits: he did a bad picture called The Delinquents, and that got him the co-directing job on a maudlin documentary, The James Dean Story. (But there was no hint that Altman identified with Dean, or his troubled generation, or the mawkish theme song on the Dean film--"Let Me Be Loved.") He did some work directing television and he made a sci-fi picture called Countdown. What that meant was that as he came to make M.A.S.H., in 1970, he was already forty-five--in a movie world in which people such as Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, and Spielberg were getting their break at half his age. Was the Kansas City man a late developer, or a drummer who moved to his own lazy beat?

Altman nearly missed out on M.A.S.H. He was not well known enough. There were arguments that it was right for Stanley Kubrick. But two friends, George Litto and Ingo Preminger, carried the day, despite the studio’s refusal to give Altman any points on profits. Then the picture was a breakout hit after Fox had thought it would need a lot of changes. Riotous preview screenings showed that Altman’s insouciance and irreverence had caught a new young mood of 1970. So the military field hospital in Korea abandoned every hallowed sense of duty and respect. It treated the doctoring as a bloody job for hip young guys worried about tee times and fucking nurses. Of course it was truer to life than any war comedy had ever been, and beneath the blood and the wisecracks it was easy to mistake Korea for Vietnam--who really knew, when it had been shot at Malibu and in the L.A. canyons? M.A.S.H. was a merciless celebration of a men’s club--perhaps the only sane way to handle a war--and was so steadily funny that audiences were either offended or charmed. But they were never indifferent. As much as any movie of the 1970s, M.A.S.H. divided the crowd--and though it got a best-picture nomination and a nod for Altman himself, the grindingly archaic Patton won those Oscars. In hindsight, we are left wishing that the inspired teasing and disrespect of Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould could be ladled over the pomp of George C. Scott!

M.A.S.H. came from a novel that the distinguished scenarist Ring Lardner Jr. had adapted. But then Altman proceeded to trash and re-do Lardner’s script--the Oscar was the writer’s reward, said the deadpan Altman. At last a personal style was at work: the film was an excuse for an ensemble in which outward codes of rank and duty were dismantled by improvisation and insurrection. The players refused to take anything seriously, and Altman reduced everyone to the level of "support." All of a sudden you could detect an attitude in Altman that most set-piece American movies were stuffed, and deserved deflation and deconstruction. In time M.A.S.H. was a smash (the only one of Altman’s career), and so liberating that it paved the way for a TV series that increasingly settled for the sweet routines of character, comedy, and anti-war sentiments. The astonishing thing about the movie M.A.S.H.--and Altman made not a penny from the TV show--is that it did not even bother to be anti-war.