In 1970, Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H about a mobile army surgical hospital (the acronym of the title) in the Korean War was a major critical and commercial success. Using the earlier conflict as a stand-in for the horrors of Vietnam at the time, M*A*S*H brought in over $80 million in box office receipts and resulted in a Best Screenplay Oscar for the previously blacklisted writer, Ring Lardner Jr. Further awards followed at the BAFTAs, Golden Globes, and the Cannes Film Festival for the movie, actors, and Altman as director. M*A*S*H struck a resonant chord in post-countercultural America, its scathing attack on war and dark comedic roots caustically situating it at the heart of the mayhem that Vietnam had become, the medics in the film making light of every conceivable injury that enters their surgical tent. It was a film that fitted neatly into the “New Hollywood” moment and seemed at odds with more conventional war films of the time such as Patton, M*A*S*H's studio sibling that was also made at Twentieth Century-Fox. And yet M*A*S*H appeared to be defying more than the dying embers of American patriotic sentiment during the chaotic Nixon years. It was taking a swipe at Hollywood principles too. It tapped into anti-war sentiment and yet its comedy ridiculed all manner of subjects and positions, both from the political left and right.

Altman's quirky direction was equally off-kilter, the film a series of raucous situations that add up to a dismembered narrative memorable for its quotable scenes, but somehow detached from a cohesive storyline that might offer answers, even redemption, for the bloody quagmire the United States found itself in as a new decade dawned. As Robert Neimi explains, M*A*S*H* the film was, like the novel, anti-authoritarian and episodic, “really just a disjointed series of comic vignettes.” For Robert Sklar, it was a picture that nevertheless positioned Altman at the forefront of cinema's “creative dissidence” by the end of the sixties. And it was a dissidence that the director maintained throughout the following decade, despite Hollywood's rediscovery of its commercial instincts during the 1970s with movies like Jaws and Star Wars.

A similar creative dissidence infused the career of writer-director Richard Brooks some twenty years earlier. The anti-authoritarianism that Neimi identified in Altman's oeuvre, that sense of kicking against the established order, was a similar facet identified in Brooks's own filmmaking.