User Reviews

Directed by Mike Nichols, the screenplay by Buck Henry is totally brilliant. The novel by Joseph Heller is itself brilliantly written, with nuances and subtleties many readers miss. Henry caught the gist of the novel and got it on screen, using the device of returning again and again to an airplane with a scene we don't fully see, showing us a little more each time, then fading to white as we get the voice over of the next scene. We get the circularity of the novel and the scattered sanity of Yossarian as he struggles to keep his shredded reality less tattered if not totally intact.

The cast is incredible. Nichols gives us an all-star cast without the drivel of such disasters as "A Bridge Too Far" and "The Longest Day." The cast includes Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Buck Henry, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, John Voight, and Orson Welles, among many, many others.

Henry had to make a movie out of the novel, so he made some hard choices, excising characters and situations that some find disappointing. My suggestion is to see the movie as the movie without comparing it to the book; on the other hand, I'm astounded at how well Henry captured the essence of Heller and his work. Jon Voight is chilling as Minderbinder, who is in my very humble opinion the lynchpin of the movie. When Minderbinder tells Yossarian, "Then they'll understand," the full impact of World War II (and who's the real enemy) shatters Yossarian's weakening sanity.

For me the end of the novel and the end of the movie are unsatisfying, but the ride is still worth it.

Trivial notes concerning the people involved in the movie. Mike Nichols also directed "The Graduate," with Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. Charles Grodin (Arfy Aardvark) was supposed to play Benjamin, but couldn't agree on a salary with Nichols, so Bancroft suggest Dustin Hoffman to Nichols - she'd heard about Hoffman from her husband, Mel Brooks, who had just signed Hoffman for his movie "The Producers." Hoffman bailed on Brooks and did "The Graduate" instead. Norman Fell (Sgt. Towser) played Benjamin's landlord in a short scene (also involving Richard Dreyfus) in "The Graduate." Bob Balaban (Capt. Orr) was in "Midnight Cowboy" with Jon Voight (and Dustin Hoffman, of course). Buck Henry wrote a TV series for Richard Benjamin (Major Danby), who is married to Paula Prentiss (Nurse Duckett). Orson Welles (General Dreedle) did the voice-over narration for Mel Brooks's "History of the World." Mel Brooks and Buck Henry developed "Get Smart." Bob Newhart (Major Major Major) and Peter Bonerz (Capt. McWatt) were in The Bob Newhart Show together. And Susanne Benton (Dreedle's WAC) had a completely unrelated role in the totally unrelated "A Boy and his Dog." Hollywood is a small town.

Yossarian is a US Army bombardier serving in Mediterranean Italy during World War II. Despairing of the horrors, lunatic bureaucracy and general insanity all around, he resolves to get grounded by claiming to be crazy. But there's a catch; to be grounded you must be diagnosed as crazy, but if you ask to be grounded then quite clearly you're sane ...

Much like Naked Lunch, this is a good movie of a good book which is fairly unfilmable. Joseph Heller's 1961 novel is an amazing achievement - arguably the first novel to deal with war as both horror and comedy, using an episodic stream of consciousness approach which enhances both sides of the material to great effect. The movie, made at the height of the US-Vietnam war, has something of a hippy sensibility, but is very successful in its surrealism and satire. It's almost impossible to imagine it being made nowadays; scenes like the one where Yossarian pretends to be the son of a visiting family when the real son has inconveniently died shortly before are too daring and avant garde for a modern studio picture. The movie piles on craziness after craziness without ever seeming heavy-handed, but for every funny moment there are carefully crafted shocks, culminating in Yossarian's post-curfew walk through a city where crime and depravity have become so common that no-one hardly notices anymore. The film's trump card is a stunning cast of great actors in early stages of their careers; Voight, Garfunkel (billed here as Arthur), Sheen, Grodin and Balaban are all terrific, Newhart is very funny as the harassed Major Major, and Welles steals his scenes as the world-weary General Dreedle. The best two performances for me though are from Arkin and Perkins, perhaps the two most interesting American actors of their generation, who seem to make almost every nuance and gesture somehow add to the characterisation and impact of each scene. Nervous comedy is probably about the hardest thing to play, and this is a masterclass from both. Nicely shot in the Sonora desert by David Watkin, with an amazing main set built by Richard Sylbert. Written by Buck Henry (who plays the cigar-chewing Lieutenant-Colonel Korn), who also collaborated with Nichols on their previous movie, The Graduate. It's worth noting the influence of the seminal 1923 Czechoslovakian novel The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, on both the movie and Heller's book. Not everything in the film works as well as it could; the absence of a score for me is a problem, the situations are so extreme that they require patience and an open mind, and as with all non-structured writing it does sometimes slip into an episodic feel, rather than a flowing story. It's an amazing statement on what war is really all about though, made by a big studio (Paramount) during a short interval when Hollywood had the courage to back filmmakers and artists to try something imaginative and different. If you've only vaguely heard the term Military Industrial Complex and can't see why there are always so many nasty little wars going on all around our world, this is a good movie to try and catch for some answers.

If we pause to consider it was, logistics to one side, relatively easy to adapt Gone With The Wind for the screen, as it was To Kill A Mockingbird, once you had Rhett Butler and Atticus Finch squared away it was just manual labor. But would YOU like to be the one that shot a movie version of The Catcher In The Rye? No, I didn't think so. Same thing with Catch-22; sometimes a best-selling, even 'cult' novel just SEEMS elusive but isn't really but sometimes it IS, and Catch-22 is one of those times. Buck Henry and Mike Nichols certainly gave it the old college try and probably made as good a fist of it as anyone could but in the end it was like nailing jelly to the wall. The thing about the novel is that you can open it virtually anywhere and you'll eventually get back to the beginning, it's a kind of Finnegan's Wake-lite without the contrived words i.e. in conventional English. The movie has made a half-decent stab at the same thing but a crucial mistake was eliminating some characters and cutting and pasting with events. Nevertheless worth a look.

The film is set during a campaign by the United States Army Air Corps, to oust the Nazi Germans from the then fascist Italy during World War II. Alan Arkin plays the main character Captain John Yossarian, in this surreal black comedy.

Catch-22 is undoubtedly one of those "Marmite" films, as in you will either love it or hate it and the reasons for loving or hating it will be just as complex as the storyline itself, outlining the decent into the insanity that is the war machine. Shot from the perspective of the anti- hero Captain John Yossarian (Arkin) a bombardier aboard a B-52 warplane. Has seen to much war and death in particular the death of a gunner, whom Yossarian barely had time to get to know. Seems to haunt Yossarian throughout the film with increasing gore and intensity that in my opinion is (by shear design of (Nichols) to show us the wounds that we associate with warfare all the while Yossarian is wrestling with wounds that cannot be seen.

With an all-star cast and wonderful cinematography from David Watkin whom was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts for this film. Wonderfully utilising the Panavision lenses to capture wide shots with beautiful precision with the copious number of long takes, this imparts upon the film a sense of realism that would certainly be lost with more edit/cut points. As anti-war propaganda goes this film is poignant in its overview of callous commanding officers who seem to care more about making it into newspaper articles than keeping up the morale of the men under their command not to mention how Catch-22 illustrates the corruption that war breeds in men.

Financial corruption highlighted by theft of US Army Air Corps property to sell for profit. When this film was released, the United States of America was fighting a Cold War with the United Soviet States of Russia, and a dubious conflict against farmers in Vietnam so far to say that war was at the forefront of US politics. Then along comes a film that satires the bureaucracy of war, add into the equation that post-traumatic stress was being researched in earnest, due to the mental states of the Vietnam Veterans returning to the US. A few sore spots and tender nerves have been commented upon in this film. However, with a non-liner story line this point is somewhat lost, so is an underlying theme of American Corporate greed, putting profits in front of the lives of soldiers which seems to ring true in the Theaters of War today.

Catch-22 is really a film of two parts, comedy for the first half of the film, refreshingly not typical American slapstick but dark and cerebral, and often sexually orientated. Not surprising there since the main stage for Catch- 22 is an Army Air Corps base where the only women are the nurses, there are only a handful there, and they know it. Throwing sexual tension into a mixture of insane orders, insufficient equipment due to it being sold for a profit, and egotistical commanding officers.

The second half of Catch-22 gets all serious pointing out in no uncertain terms the effects on the mental state of service men that are continually ordered to fight and kill, and watch their friends getting picked off. With inflexible commanding officers and a general (wonderfully played by Orson Wells) who just seems to just want to shoot his subordinates. Our intrepid anti-hero, Yossarian, cowardly he is in the respect that all he wants is, to get out of the war and go home and to get laid.

Yet Yossarian displays strength of character seldom seen when he refuses to bomb a town that seemingly has no strategic value to friend or foe. For so many atrocities in war have been followed by the excuse "I was only following orders", for an officer to disobey orders for not making logical sense, however, in some circumstances the reasons for some actions cannot be fathomed by the subordinates, as the lower ranks or public are not always given all information due to operational secrecy. However, Catch-22 is not a film about military law if that is what you are after then this I would suggest "A Few Good Men" or "G.I. Jane".

Having said all that, Catch-22 is a film of technical precision, with beautiful set pieces and a darker take on the heroic face of war, and how desperation can lead a rational person to commit seemingly insane things, even though the rational thing to do is the insane thing. If you are of the frame of mind that can fathom this film then you will thoroughly enjoy it. However, if not then this film will seem akin to The Emperors New Suit. For me personally it is interesting to watch such a film and the comments it makes.

Such comments could well be made today however, today's film makers seem to want to stay as far away from these issues as possible, and just show us giant robots that duke it out. In High Definition, Three Dimensional, Computer Generated Imagery, with about as much substance and depth as the images themselves or what the High Society was up to during the major conflicts that defined the past two hundred years.

Catch-22 is a movie I've wanted to watch for quite some time. In fact, I've owned the DVD for years, I found it in the $5.50 bin at Wal-Mart way back when. For one reason or another I've never gotten around to watching it until today. The film is a satire of the absurdity of war, it's commercialization, and of bureaucracy in general. The story, in a nutshell, involves a bombardier who doesn't want to fly anymore missions and desperately tries to get grounded on the grounds of insanity. But, this turns out to be easier said than done.

The cast is one of the most eclectic I've ever seen: Alan Arkin, Art Garfunkel, Bob Newhart, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Orson Welles, Bob Balaban, and Charles Grodin, to name a few (it's interesting seeing some of them in such early roles). They play characters with quirky names such as: Major Major, Chaplain Tappman, Milo Minderbinder, and General Dreedle, each with their varying degrees of insanity. The Major who is forced to take over as squadron leader (an unwanted job) refuses to let people in his office to see him while he is in. They can be sent in to see him after he's left, however (which barely scratches the surface of a great sequence of dialogue). The Lieutenant who trades much-needed supplies with other countries, including the enemy, believes they can come out of the war rich. The General who doesn't understand why he can't shoot an insubordinate officer. The Captain who has crash-landed into the sea four times but always manages to survive and fly right back out there, which has a great payoff in the end. With everyones' use of insanity to cope with the horrors of war, I couldn't help but to draw comparisons to M*A*S*H, the film more than the TV show.

Catch-22 was adapted by Buck Henry from a novel, of the same title, authored by Joseph Heller. The story is, effectively, told in a non linear fashion and with recurring flashbacks. As with other satires, many of the situations in the film are absurd, some brilliantly so. And I loved the "who's on first" nature of the dialogue, going in circles, never quite reaching a logical conclusion. However, I'm interested in reading the book sometime. A couple of the characters felt underused in the screenplay, especially Newhart as Major Major and Welles as General Dreedle.

It's director is Mike Nichols, who also did the classic film The Graduate. Though not his best work, it's certainly not his worst either. He opens the film with a beautiful sunrise slowly coming up over a mountainous horizon. All we hear initially is the occasional dog barking or bird chirping. Then, the sound of jet engines roaring. Much of the films opening dialogue is all but drowned out by these sounds of planes starting, taking off, landing, even crashing but the characters carry on, unphased, as if nothing is happening. Nichols' portrayal of humor and violence, often simultaneously, is quite jarring.

Though not quite as good as I was hoping, some of the hilariously insane situations and ingenious dialogue make it well worth a watch...

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