Remember how the Kellerman character reacts to the jokes played on her? And compare that with how the Gwen Welles character reacts to the male audience, for instance. The difference between these two films is the presence in _Nashville_ of a perspective that questions men's and the total lack thereof in _M*A*S*H*_. Likewise, the Julie Christie character presents a perspective that questions men's in _McCabe and Mrs. Miller_, and the film in fact ends with a close-up that calls attention to her gaze.
It is of course possible for viewers, _if_ they see _M*A*S*H*_ from a feminist point of view, to condemn its male characters as sexist, but _the film's own portrayal of them does not_, whereas in the two films I discussed, there are perspectives _within the films_ that question men's behaviors.
>>Also, films reclect the times in which they were
>>made; it is not insiginificant that _Nashville_ was made in 1975 and
>>_McCabe and Mrs. Miller_ 1971, respectively.
>
>Perhaps you're right. That years were, after all, mostly concurrent with
>the extremely mysoginistic counterculture.
I don't think things got much better in mass culture, and in some ways they got worse. For instance, what's this portrayal of women obsessed with marriage in a spate of very popular films (e.g. _Pretty Woman_ [1990], _Jerry Maguire_ [1996], _My Best Friend's Wedding_ [1997], _In & Out_ [1997], etc.) in the last couple of decades? And compare them to Martin Ritt's _Norma Rae_ (1979), for instance. Or compare _The Player_ (1992) with _McCabe and Mrs. Miller_ within Altman's career.
In some ways things did get better: compare _Bound_ (1996) to _Les Diaboliques_ (1955).
Generally speaking, I don't consider most films as part of 'couterculture'. Films like _Norma Rae_, _Nashville_, etc. that in some ways went beyond most and questioned sexism are reactions to women's movement, and they were and have been rather exceptional. Now we don't have a strong women's movement, and then we get films like _The Blair Witch Project_.
Yoshie