
MASH
Altman's overlapping dialogue turns up fully formed: army surgeons in Korea behave appallingly in order to stay sane, and the film was really about Vietnam all along.

Altman's overlapping dialogue turns up fully formed: army surgeons in Korea behave appallingly in order to stay sane, and the film was really about Vietnam all along.

The diner scene has outlived the film's whole era: a classical pianist walked away from his family to work oil rigs, and nobody here will explain him or forgive him.

Coppola co-wrote it before The Godfather and George C. Scott refused the Oscar: a monologue in front of an enormous flag opens the most ambivalent film Hollywood ever made about a general.

The sixties end on camera here: the Maysles followed the Rolling Stones to a free concert at Altamont, then sat Mick Jagger at an editing bench and made him watch what happened.

Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker were on the editing crew, cutting three days of festival into split-screen: half a million people, no violence, and a mud field that became a permanent reference.

Made during Vietnam and aimed straight at it: a 121-year-old man narrates his life across the frontier, and Arthur Penn makes the cavalry the villains for once.

The novel was written from the screenplay and not the other way around: a Harvard hockey player and a Radcliffe music student marry against his father, and one line became inescapable.