writers_reign
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.
alexcurren
I suspect that if Robert Altman's ground breaking M.A.S.H. had not come out the same year, Catch-22 might have lived on as the Vietnam era satirical anti-war film. I'm glad M.A.S.H. did come along because this film was dribble. I think Mike Nichols ego got the better of him, having come off two hits (Graduate and ...Virginia Woolf), and the film suffers for this. He took a seminal postmodern work and destroyed it, the viewer forced to watch this disaster at twenty four frames a second.All Nichols had to do was pull a John Houston. For years many filmmakers tried to make the Maltese Falcon, but they deviated from the novel, and the films were awful. Nichols just needed to put the book in script form, and then chop off some of the fat in the editing room. Instead we are forced to watch this mangled train wreck. There are a few good moments, the Snowden scene cut up and running through the film was a very nice touch. The casting was good for the most part, but we didn't have enough time with each character to really get to know them, to care about them, to hate them. Believing Art Garfunkel as Natley the rich New Englander is beyond the talent and abilities of Mr. Garfunkel, and insulting to actors and New Englanders everywhere. Jon Voight was absolutely wrong for Milo, the whimsical pseudo-communist capitalist running an empire of trades and deals. The role demanded someone with a bit of the shady New York about him, not Mid-western Nordicism. So many little tidbits are missing, and Catch-22 is story about little tidbits, little stories that all weave together to form a rich tapestry of life. Major Major Major Major came and went like a flash, no mention of Washington Irving. I was hoping that they could have cast Peter Fonda, and played up the Henry Fonda resemblance more. Nor a hint of the CID men who came to interview him.One of the most critical, and humorous scenes in the novel is the interrogation of Clevinger. It was one of the funniest things I've read in a novel, and it surmises the absurdity of the chain of command, and war in general. I was on the edge of my seat waiting for this pivotal scene that never came. General Scheisskopf is also absent, along with his parades, and masochistic wife. I saw Doc Daneeka as the guy who tells really dirty jokes when no one is looking, an edge to the man, a cunningness, a shifty opportunistic abortionist, and as good as Jack Gilford is, he's not that guy. The list continues on and on. Arkin was somewhat of a saving grace for this picture; he was cast accordingly, and did the best he could amongst the visceral carnage laid out on celluloid. The subtle allegories to heaven were also a little hackneyed. True one reading from this novel that some of it happened in a death dream state, a blur between life, death, reality and unreality. It would have come off much stronger to play it straight, Bea Arthur straight, and punched the jokes in strong. It's the contrast of order versus dis-order that make Catch-22 so endearing. That military men act illogically in logical situations, and logically in illogical situations. When translating a dialogue rich novel such as Catch-22, it's usually best to stick with the story in the novel. It would be wonderful is someone down the road dusted off a copy of this fine work of post war literature, wrote it out in script form, and shot it. The whimsical, satirical, nonsensical, non-linear structure might play better with cinema trappings of early 21st century cinema; Post- Tarantino, Chapter 1, The Texan, and so forth. Until then we're left with this dud.
SnoopyStyle
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.
Neil Welch
Joseph Heller's angry novel - pointing up the futility of war by cranking absurdity up to a comic level - becomes a large scale Hollywood movie which works hard at capturing the essence of the book but, perhaps, sinks somewhat under its own weight.It is well worth watching nonetheless - spectacular, and featuring a vast and starry cast, yet still intelligent and relatively small scale in terms of the intimate story of Yossarian's nightmarish war experience, it is held together by a passionate and committed performance by Alan Arkin as Yossarian, a victim (as are many of the characters) turned attempted protagonist.But I think I would recommend the book over the film.
