I loathe war movies. I also loathe hospital movies, and movies with predominantly male stars (really, who wants to sit and watch a bunch of men running around?) And I really loathe movies with long football scenes. Yet then we have Robert Altman's "MASH," and it is one of my favorite movies. I watch it every fall, mostly for the football scene.

The story, such as it is, opens with surgeons Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Duke (Tom Skerritt) arriving at their Mobile Army Surgical Hospital near the Korean War front lines; they amble into the mess hall, where they're greeted by a cacophony of overlapping dialogue as they ogle the beautiful Lt. Dish (Jo Ann Pflug). Then they get to work. And that's pretty much the movie: They work, and they goof around trying to stay sane. Their antics are silly but the movie's never cute — there's always an edge.

Duke and Hawkeye are soon joined by heart surgeon Trapper John (Elliott Gould), and the three set about taking down their twin nemeses: Bible-thumping Maj. Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and bureaucracy-loving Maj. Margaret Houlihan (Sally Kellerman). I love the moment when Frank is praying out loud while the others drink martinis, and he earnestly asks God to protect the soldiers and the commander in chief; Duke and Hawkeye both start and lower their glasses in genuine shock. It's a massive faux pas to them, I think, to suggest that God has anything to do with the hideous things that are happening at the front.

The movie's not quite antireligious — Rene Auberjonois plays the affable chaplain Dago, who's kind of in his own serene little world but who's much more practical than Frank. There's a wonderful bit where Duke interrupts him as he performs last rites in a hopelessly understaffed operating room: "Dago! I want you over here to hold this retraction. Now! … I'm sorry, Dago, but this man is still alive and that other man is dead, and that's a fact." In a field hospital, God just has to wait.

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