The shrewdness of the two central characters - brilliantly played by Elliot Gould (right, and Donald Sutherland - provides most of the humour of the film and the sheer incompetence of the army provides CINEMA

8.50 9.10 10.00 10.40 BI 11.00 7.05 8.00 REMINDER hat 'KES' written by ind acted by DAVID .ondon.

BBC 1 5.50 News and weather.

across the North Pole.

NEWS and ...weather.

Rally through 25 countries and two continents.

BC 2 11.20 a.m. PLAY SCHOOL. p.m. MAKING OUT. 7.30 NEWS and weather. HTV (Wales) colour channel 61 as above except: 4.03-4.05 Report West. 5.30 Lone Ranger. 5.38-5.45 Peter. 5.55-6.35 Scene HTV (Cymru/Wales) black and white ervice as above except: .30 Y dydd. 5.40-5.45 News. room. 4.35 London. 5.30 Summer season. London. 6.30 "The Overlanders' with Crossroads chipsutlanders News. 6.35 7.00 Movie: A group • of Australian stand against the japanese in 1942. 'HOW COME a degenerate like that ends up in a position of responsibility?' fumes a regular US Army nurse about Captain 'Hawkeye' Pearce.

'He was drafted, comes the laconic reply.

And that really is the essence of 'M*A*S*H' now showing at the Rialto.

It's the story of a medical unit four miles behind the front line during the Korean war. They are nearly all doctors and surgeons who have been drafted.

By the hour the war casualties are flown in by helicopter, bleeding, dying, wounded. They have no names, no numDers, they never speak, same tharr anant seldom referred to; they are merely bloody carcasses that the surgeons sew up, and yet a constant reminder of the reason why they are all there.

Iconoclasts

And it is precisely that reality that every one is in retreat from.

No one wants to be thene, no one asked to be there. What dominates is a sense of self-preservation.

The two central characters, brilliantly played by Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland, are good humoured iconoclasts, with contempt for military formality, Christianity, rules and regulations.

What gives them the upper hand, what chills their martinis, what keeps them in women and out of the brig is their own cunning and a sense of their own professionalism. They know that they are experts at their job and that to the army they are indispensable, and the army will just have to put up with them.

Standard

Their shrewdness provides most of the humour in the film and the sheer incompetence of the Army provides the rest. The situations are pretty standard Army comedy, but what the film is most determined about is to debunk any idea of heroics and glory in war, and not only war itself, but the whole myth-making apparatus of Hollywood itself.

The Tannoy that blares out information to the camp amnounces also the showing of movies, glorious stories of ordinary GIs in battle.

No one pays the slightest attention to either the movies or the information.

Fatigue

What comes out in 'M*A*S*H' is a sense of the growing fatigue at the claptrap about war and glory, of the imperialist role of America, a mood that severad Hollywood films have lately captured, like 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'.

The first impression is one of health. It's a very popular film in America and obviously reflects feelings about the But delve a little deeper and one hits contradictions that are interesting.

The heroes are rebels, but what they have is cheek and know-how, and no one in American culture is given more respect than the rebel with know-how.

American capitalism is based on it. Wasn't Henry Ford a rebel with it? It's pure individualism, licking the system by getting to the top. last Thursday, just a few hours before the captain of the England fronted his bis Ma de, was and hopped on a plane to join his team mates in Mexico City.

he alleged theft of a race et in bogotal on been the subject of acres of print.

became an issue of national importance hardly rivalled by the announcement of the June General Election.

British embassy officials were mobilized and Mr Stewart, the Foreign Secretary, sent a message to the Colombian government, indicating the concern over the case of Mr Moore and expressing the hope that everything would be done to settle the matter as soon as possible. • Britain was in danger! There was a conspiracy afoot to deprive her team of their rightful place as world champions at kicking an inflated leather sphere around a field!

takes place in Mexico, a country ruled by the military dictatorship of President Diaz Ordaz, which uses every means of terror and repression against opponents, was, for Fleet Street, neither here nor there. Except to Mexico 19/0- behind THE NEWS Still the land of the repressed 'CONFIDENT that Moore would be back among them within the next 24 hours, the players set off to train in the Olympic Stadium accompanied by a police escort worthy of gold bullion. The team coach, four motorcycle outriders and a riot van with three policemen clinging to its rear, coasted the journey of eight miles at a steady 50 miles per hour? Thus spake "The Guardian' The plight of Mr Moore since For Fleet Street it at once So that all the taboos they break are, in essence, an affirmation of the old individualism. It comes full circle, the old form with a different content.

The virility cult dominates, women are merely sexual abjects, men are defined by the size of the penis ("The best equipped dentist in the American army'), straight jackets are funny; this is the vein of humour confirmed by the film and played on that level.

It's a kind of traditional student comedy, a harder, more sophisticated kind of 'Doctor in the House' with blood.

If you compare it with the provide a spot of 'local colour' perhaps.

Back in 1968 while the Meximan workers and peasants lived in dégradation and poverty, the sumptuous Olympic Stadium took shape in their midst in preparation for the Olympic Games:

The hovels and shanties were crushed and destroyed to make way for this massive symbol of BOBBY MOORE prestige and those that remained standing at the stadium's periphery were painted so as not to upset the tourists' delicate stomachs.

(They haven't bothered with the paint this year.)

The rich and the famous were already arriving from all parts of the globe when the Mexican students were beaten up and massacred in the streets as they tion of war.

And interestingly enough we have yet another maverick rebel, only this time he's mad, obsessive, extremely right wing. But a 'character': need one say more.

It merely serves to highlight this American admiration : of the rebel of whatever form, shape or size.

The film lumbers from one noisy battle to the next and is linked by the reactionary rhetoric of Patton himself.

I won't waste any more space on it.

demonstrated their opposition to the Ordaz regime. are stil in jail two years later. Many the student leaders Now, as the various teams compete for the much-desired sports honour, 170 political risoners are rotting in Mexico's ecumberri prison. Some have been detained for more than ten years without trial.

It is only a few months since the brutal beatings took place when Brigadier-Genenal Andres Puentes Vagas openly incited criminal prisoners to attack political detainees. They were beaten with pipes and iron bars and some stabbed.

Eighty went on hunger strike in protest against this treatment and against the refusal of the government to either release them on bail or bring their cases into open court.

Then, as the British team were arriving in S America, the Guatemalan revolutionary and guerrilla leader Marco Antonio Yon Sosa was killed in a border battle with Mexican soldiers.

. This is Mexico - and Latin America-today.

The Mexican people do not view the World Cup simply in terms of football, but sense the huge contradiction between their oppression and the wealth that is flaunted before their eyes.

Little wonder that some of those who will be 'privileged' to see Bobby Moore and his colleagues and (from afar) hear of the VIP treatment acoorded to them-as 'The Guardian' described-will see them as indirect supporters of the Diaz Ordaz regime.

The British press is a million miles from the conflict material forces that is the real Mexico. But that, of course, is capitalist 'objectivity'. ratus that surrounds them, their own special talents, the curious position that they are in and occupy.

It's not by accident that they characterized a whole period of the 1960s.

But this is banal and perfunctory and mindless-every pop cliché in the book is If you like the music buy the record. If you can afford it.

There's obviously a lot to be said and assessed about the Beatles but I reserve that for a later date.