M*A*S*H Cut What Would Have Been A Hilarious From Here To Eternity Parody
It's easy to forget that "M*A*S*H" was actually a period piece. The acclaimed sitcom was filmed in the '70s and borrowed liberally from compassionate discussions surrounding the Vietnam War, but it took place two decades earlier, in 1950s Korea. Despite anachronistic '70s mustaches (here's looking at you, B.J. Hunnicutt), a timeline that reimagined the relatively short Korean War as near-endless, and the occasional not-retro-enough prop, the show still worked hard to bring a fairly accurate vision of the 1950s to life.
Sometimes, that meant referencing movies that were made in the 1930s and '40s, like "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Good Earth." In other instances, though, the series got ahead of itself, name-dropping movies that hadn't been released yet. The show's masterpiece series finale, the feature-length concluding story "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen," apparently almost included a reference that straddled the line between anachronism and timeliness. According to The Hollywood Reporter's 35th-anniversary spotlight on the finale, director, star, and co-writer Alan Alda nearly included a spontaneous reference to "From Here To Eternity," a film that hit theaters a week after the real Korean War ended in 1953.
Nurse Kellye almost got a big make-out scene
Another period piece, "From Here To Eternity" followed a trio of U.S. soldiers stationed in Hawaii in the early 1940s, just before Pearl Harbor. The cast was led by hunks Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Frank Sinatra, and its most famous scene features Lancaster locked in a passionate embrace with Deborah Kerr's character after a day spent frolicking on the beach. In retrospect, the sandy love scene is short and not all that steamy, but at the time, audiences and Hollywood reacted strongly to the film's frank scenes of sexuality. "From Here To Eternity" went on to win eight Oscars, and posters for the film still feature its most famous make-out scene.
Enter zany tragicomedy "M*A*S*H": according to the late actor Kellye Nakahara, who played the endearing and underrated supporting character Nurse Kellye on the show, Alda spent two hours of the finale's beach-set shoot filming a scene in which she and co-star G.W. Bailey, who played obnoxious company driver Rizzo, parodied the "From Here To Eternity" love scene. "For two hours, we lay down in that water with waves running over us," Nakahara told the outlet, explaining that the sequence was dreamt up after Alda saw the pair messing around during the shoot.
Instead of an emotional scene, though, this one was meant to be funny. "G.W. had a cigar in his mouth. I was spitting water in his face with waves washing over us," Nakahara told THR. The scene sounds hilarious, especially given the fact that neither character had interacted much beforehand, so it would've given the impression that they got carried away by the brief respite of a sunny day off and decided to randomly hook up. "We had a crowd cheering and laughing," the actor recalled.
The parody ultimately got cut
Alas, the parody wasn't meant to be. "The shot ended up on the cutting-room floor," Nakahara said in 2018. This makes sense: the beach scene is meant to indicate a sense of carefree joy that's soon cut short by one of the show's bleakest moments, so the sequence may have been a bit too broad and silly to include. It also feels like a step backward for Nakahara's character, as the Hawaiian actor was underserved by the show's early seasons and only began to gain significant speaking parts later in the series' run. While it would've been fun to set the two minor characters up in a low-stakes tryst, showing the moment without context would've felt like yet another instance of the show underusing a great performer.
Instead of parodying "From Here To Eternity," the "M*A*S*H" finale ended up making up its own oft-parodied big kiss moment. In one of the episode's final scenes, Hawkeye (Alan Alda) and Margaret (Loretta Swit) engage in an inappropriately long and intimate goodbye kiss, a moment that plays on the fine line the pair walked between friends and lovers throughout the series. Only the episode's editors know if the final call was as simple as cutting out one comedic kiss to emphasize another, but it seems likely that the lovingly silly homage to Lancaster and Kerr's smooch would've otherwise made the cut.
Personally, I think "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" could've crammed in even more big, dramatic kisses, but the finale we ended up with was nonetheless magnificent. To this day, the episode's original telecast remains one of the most-watched TV transmissions of all time, with more than half of all U.S. households tuning in to see the show's farewell. The "From Here To Eternity" cut, it seems, was only ever seen by the show's cast and crew.