M*A*S*H

5. “Dead Serious” in Living Color

Although, as Donald McBride argues, television coverage of the Korean War “was sketchy at best” during the years in which it was fought (1950–53), this “police action” was nevertheless brought to the attention of the American public through other media, entertainment, and news outlets .1 Beginning in January 1951, William Gaines’s EC comic book series Two-Fisted Tales offered visceral, blood-soaked depictions of the fighting presented in bold primary colors that contributed to its combined realism and artifice. On the first day of that same month, Time featured a “Man of the Year” cover spread in which a composite image and profile of the American fighting man provided readers a glimpse into the military mindset.2 A few other cultural productions of the early 1950s served a significant role in educating the populace about the events in Korea. One notable example came from the photojournalist David Douglas Duncan, a contributor to Life magazine who landed with General Douglas MacArthur and the X Corps at Inch’ŏn in September 1950. Duncan’s pictures of “The Big Mac” (as he is sometimes referred to in M*A*S*H) would be disseminated in the media for years to come, capC h a p t e r 5 “Dead Serious” in Living Color 63 Chapter 5 turing heroic images of the Supreme Commander of U.N. Forces as he drove the marines up to the Chosin Reservoir. Accompanying Duncan on that historical Inch’ŏn landing and northward drive was the Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins, author of the best-selling book War in Korea (1951), which likewise bolstered popular opinion and support for the war “as a necessary effort to contain the expansion of international communism.”3 Once the Chinese People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yalu River and sent American and other U.N. troops retreating, stateside support for the war dropped off precipitously, and news coverage of the conflict was eventually pushed to the periphery as it stretched on through several armistice negotiations. At first, the Korean War was seen by Hollywood executives as the means for a possible return to the economic prosperity that the studios had enjoyed during World War II, something of paramount importance given the increasingly competitive atmosphere in which TV—a new medium—was threatening the old system’s hegemony by luring audiences away from movie theaters. But for all their initial optimism, this ultimately unpopular war proved to be less than lucrative for the production and distribution companies involved. To their credit, major studios like Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros. tentatively released a few independently produced , low-budget films from mavericks like Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet [1951], Fixed Bayonets [1951]) and Joseph H. Lewis (Retreat, Hell! [1952]), which feature harrowing depictions of American soldiers suffering psychological crises and physical injuries, not to mention inglorious defeats that were anathema to audiences familiar with earlier biopics and war epics like Sergeant York (1941), Pride of the Marines (1945), and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). But these and other representative Korean War films, such as Battle Circus (1953), Flight Nurse (1953), The Glory Brigade (1953), and Over Korea (1953), failed to resonate with mainstream movie64 “Dead Serious” in Living Color goers. Even the “prestige” and “A” pictures produced by Hollywood studios after the 1953 ceasefire, including The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1955), The McConnell Story (1955), The Hunters (1958), and Cry for Happy (1961), tended to abstract or generalize the Korean War rather than deal with specific combatrelated areas or events,4 treating the conflict as an ideological showdown between the United States and the Communist forces of the Soviet Union and Red China rather than a fratricidal conflict that cost over one million Korean lives. While Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (shot in a mere twelve days in and around Ventura Hills) and a handful of other independent and studio-produced narrative films offer documentary -like moments that transport the viewer into perilous settings, only one motion picture produced during the war— John Ford’s This Is Korea! (1951)—brims with the kind of verisimilitude that could only otherwise be found in archival documents. The “reality effect” of this hour-long documentary derives less from the offscreen narrator’s incessant reminders that “this is Korea” than from its footage of actual combat maneuvers with mortars and rockets firing incessantly over Korean mountainsides, not to mention...