Quietly innovative in the way it approached improvisation and overlapping dialogue, Robert Altman’s MASH became a blueprint for his filmmaking style for decades afterward – including most of his greatest triumphs. While taking place during the Korean war, the exploits of surgeons desperately trying not to crack up while surrounded by madness and violence is clearly supposed to represent the climate and feeling on the ongoing Vietnam war. Furiously antiestablishment, and arguably misogynistic, the film manages to avoid the three act structure but is still able to fit in a raucous football game climax to bring things to an appropriately manic end.