Catch-22 (1970)

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Read the book twice and thoroughly enjoyed it. Saw the movie several times and even got stuck out in the suburbs the first time after seeing it twice and called up my High School Teacher and mentor Pierre Rener to come get me late after midnight hoping to brainstorm with him about it. I'll never forgot how he groaned over the phone, "Oh God! Oh God!". I was just a pimply faced teenager back then and only now as an older man do I realize how much I must have irritated the hell out of him.When I read it the first time I loved its wacky wit and snappy ending. Despite its length, for me it wasn't a hard read at all. I suppose nobody had to convince me that war was crazy as it was kind of self evident to me all along and I could kind of sense the comedic appeal of such an activity as a Theater of the Mind. The second time I brainstormed about this royally with Miss Gomez in her class 'INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL'. She was a die-hard Existentialist and used Sartre and Camus as a reference for her pontifications which were usually spot on. I can hear her now, "- every assertion implies a negation and every negation implies an assertion." A beautiful, philosophical woman she was and I learned a lot from her.All this is said to report that I saw only one way to film this thing with its myriad characters and stream of consciousness narrative moving faster than chain-lightning one-liners. I even wrote a paper about it for Miss Gomez's class where I diagrammed how the structure of the novel was very nearly a flashback within a flashback or more formally a series of chain reactions composed as flashbacks. This led Miss Gomez, God Bless her, to declare before the entire class, "Mister Boykin, you understand this novel better than I do!"Whether true or not, this is one of those stories that, like CHINATOWN, I seem to have a special affinity for because of my temperament and life experience. Paradoxes abound in Life as you surely know and - well, don't get me started about THAT. But the frenetic nature of Yossarian's mental climate as he gradually recovers from the gross traumatic incident that his mind keeps bouncing off because of the pain and horror contained therein is barely addressed or properly served in the film despite a stellar cast.This, however, is the heart and soul of the novel as it should have been with the film. The great humor of CATCH-22 comes from an inability to rationally confront and address the profound pain and horror of the wartime experience. It's this absurd dancing around the contours and the edges of something that's so abysmally hellish that gives the moral comedy of CATCH-22 its edge. Finally around Chapter Thirtynine an exhausted Yossarian realizes the dancing has to stop and he takes a walk through THE ETERNAL CITY to slow down the pace to something bordering on philosophical reflection. But even as he has slowed things down to a walk he observes that the absurdity around him continues on unabated with a will and a spirit of its own. This sense of being reluctantly forced to probe into the philosophical underpinnings of what war really is all about is remarkably absent from the film. It's a great show as was DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, but I always felt some special gravitas was missing despite the able efforts of Alan Arkin displaying all the various shades of moral outrage as Yossarian and Jon Voight offering shares for missing parachutes and chocolate covered cotton balls as 1st. Lt. Milo Minderbinder to keep his corporation afloat.The chocolate covered cotton balls are a great motif, by the way. How do you sell somebody something that nobody wants or needs and is near impossible to digest and besides offering you next to no nutrition doesn't do a damn bit of good for you? I know! We'll cover it with chocolate!The cast reads like a Who's - Who's from Saturday NIGHT LIVE and COMEDY CENTRAL. There is Richard Benjamin as Major Danby, Bob Newhart as Major Major Major, the great Orson Welles as Brigadier General Dreedle and Anthony Perkins as Chaplain Capt. A.T. Tappman. There is also Paula Prentiss as Nurse Duckett and the beautiful body of Olimpia Carlisi as Luciana for aesthetic and romantic diversion. There is even Art Garfunkel attempting to wax philosophical with a wizened old man who has seen this all a number of times before when the warriors came marching into the whorehouse.That being said, I always saw CATCH-22 as a faster paced film than this slow, ponderous elephantine thing Mike Nichols put upon the screen to convey some kind of epic movement and always sensed that the rhythms of CATCH-22 were more akin to Progressive Jazz than any type of reference to Classic Music. Just can't let go of the conviction that I could have penned a better screenplay than Buck Henry in this particular case. Although ALSO SPRACH ZARUTHUSTRA works very well when Luciana comes marching down the street.I also think one of my classmates was right about Omar Sharif. She thought it would have been interesting to see what kind of Yossarian he would have made.

Captain Yossarian (Alan Arkin) is a WWII bombardier desperate to quit the war by claiming to be crazy. However Dr. Daneeka explains that there is a catch-22. People who are willing to fly the risky life and death missions are crazy. He is bound to release crazy people as long as they make a request. However if they ask, then they don't want to fly and therefore by definition are not crazy. Colonel Cathcart (Martin Balsam) is the callous commander who keeps increasing the missions required to go home. Tappman (Anthony Perkins) is the incompetent Chaplain. Captain Major (Bob Newhart) is given the squadron command seeing that he's the only Major around except Major is just his name and not his rank. Dobbs (Martin Sheen) is the bomber pilot. Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight) is using various items in convoluted trades with wide ranging places taking the silk parachutes from the planes.This is very similar in tone with MASH. This is much more surreal. They're both anti-war black comedies. They both came out around the same time and of course, Catch-22 got crushed by the better MASH. The story feels like a bunch of disjointed skits. Some of it is hilarious. Alan Arkin is especially funny in his mania. Some of it is less funny. I would like a more straight forward story concentrating on fewer characters or maybe only Yossarian. I'm not a fan of the various 'dream' sequences since they usually stalls the movie. Later, it devolves into a series of Kafkaesque dream scenes. Most of it doesn't really work but it does recover somewhat.

I had many questions in mind when I watched this film, the first among them being, "Why was this movie made?" and a few more questions followed- "Didn't Mike Nichols read the script and suggest any revisions?" and "Couldn't it be a little more funnier, may be not as much as the book but funny nonetheless?".Adapted from Joseph Heller's one-of-the-kind satire novel, the movie failed to live up to the hype and humor the book created. Mike Nichols, fresh from winning an Academy Award for 'The Graduate' somehow lost his brilliant directing skills to a poorly written screenplay. Yes, there were jokes and funny moments, where you'd guffaw no matter what, but those moments were too few as compared to those in the book.MASH, the book, by any standards, couldn't match Joseph Heller's novel. But when it comes to Motion Picture and presenting it, Mike Nichols lost it to Robert Altman's MASH.And no one else would have made a better Yossarian than Alan Arkin. Jon Voight and Balsam were impressive too.

This film did not try to recreate the book, and so it succeeded. I am happy to say that this film just keeps getting better year after year. It's hard for me to fathom that it came out 40 years ago! For me, it was another reminder (how many do I need) of the absurdity and futility of war, every war. Thank you Joseph Hellar, thank you Mike Nichols, thank you Buck Henry. And what a fantastic cast! Too bad that the film came out in the same year as MASH. But, I must say, that I find this film far superior to MASH. Whereas MASH did a good job at keeping things light, Catch 22 managed to show the absurdity of war while not shrinking from some gritty, realistic moments. Alan Arkins' scene of discovering the truth of Snowden's death (including bloody guts exposed to the cold air) is a scene I will never forget.