Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News
Service, Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World,
Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others.
He is the founder and editor of Movie
Nation.
Perhaps
it took a humorless, career-crippling George Clooney TV
version of Joseph Heller’s novel to make us better
appreciate Mike Nichols’ daring, infamously-expensive
version of “Catch-22.”
Released
at the height of the Vietnam War, suffering in comparison
to Robert Altman’s equally anti-war dramedy “M*A*S*H,”
seemingly more on a par with equally cynical action comedy
“Kelly’s Heroes,” which has had the
benefit of a lot more TV exposure, “Catch”
still plays the way it did way back in 1970 — as
a pricey, “difficult” satire with a “difficult”
shoot as baggage.
But
wipe away the “Catch-22 lore,”the people cast
and cast-aside, the fact that Nichols wanted the more
age-appropriate Al Pacino as Yossarian, the young bombardier/anti-hero.
Grapple with the film’s disordered narrative and
come to terms with the nightmarish focus of the story
— an active-duty combat airman flying through and
ranting through what we now call Post Traumatic Stress
Syndrome, coupled with survivor’s guilt.
It’s
amazing to see now. And considering how our war movies,
from “300” to “Midway,” “Greyhound”
to “Flyboys” and even at times, “Dunkirk,”
are made now — with digital planes and ships and
sometimes tanks — they really don’t make’em
like this any more.
Nichols
made the most of his coastal Mexican location, showing
off all 17 WWII vintage B-25s taking off and landing every
chance he got. You couldn’t do that today.
And
that cast. Alan Arkin makes a fine, perplexed and outraged
Yossarian, a sane man trapped in the insanity of war,
an actor who never hits a punchline too hard, never takes
the character’s exasperation into parody.
“Let
me see if I’ve got this straight. In order to be
grounded, I’ve got to be crazy. And I must be crazy
to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means
I’m not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.”
“You
got it,” Doc Daneeka (Jack Gilford) tells him. “That’s
Catch-22.
“Whoo…
That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”
Orson
Welles as a grumpy general, Tony Perkins as a put-upon
chaplain, Martin Balsam as the murderously vain commanding
Col. Cathcart, Buck Henry as his venal sidekick, Col.
Corn (screenwriter Henry was never better as an actor),
baby-faced Bob Balaban as the always-crashing, always-tinkering,
even-tempered Orr, it’s a dazzling corps.
Bob
Newhart half-stammering through Major Major Major, a very
young Martin Sheen raging as the pilot Dobbs, Art Garfunkel
as the innocent co-pilot Nately who falls for an Italian
hooker, Charles Grodin as an upper-class twit navigator,
a smarmy, befuddlingly upbeat Richard Benjamin (cast,
with his wife Paula Prentiss as a nurse Yossarian chases),
the famous French star who fled to Hollywood Marcel Dalio
is the wizened old Italian who figures Italy has already
won the war, since it has surrendered and Americans are
still fighting and dying.
And
there’s a sea of actors we’d come to recognize
on TV (“The Bob Newhart Show” is over-represented)
in the years that followed.
Jon
Voight stands out just enough as the grinning opportunist
Milo Minderbender, a stand-in for every war profiteer
you’ve ever read about, working the angles, an impersonal
unpatriotic multinational corporation who wins no matter
who loses.
Like its two contemporaries, “M*A*S*H” and
“Kelly’s Heroes,” it’s a guy’s
movie with a dated leering quality about the opposite
sex. It’s heavy-handed, betraying Nichols —
feeling his oats after “The Graduate” —
indulging in some serious “blank check” filmmaking.
And
reading over the years of all the people Nichols wanted
to cast, or cast and then replaced, you kind of wish he’d
moved on from Gilford, a future Oscar nominee who doesn’t
bring enough cowardly sniveling to the good doc.
“Catch-22”
was popular enough that they did a pilot for a sitcom
based on it, as was the case with “M*A*S*H.”
Richard Dreyfuss had the lead in TV’s “Catch.”
Over
the years, I’ve interviewed half a dozen actors
from that all-star cast, and often, without prompting,
they’d bring it up. It took half a year of their
lives, most of them, and burned itself into their memories,
even if it wasn’t the blockbuster Paramount expected
it to be.
Watching
it again, outside of the academic settings where it turned
up in “film as satire” classes and the like,
it feels more cinematic than the scruffy, Altmanesque
“M*A*S*H,” a movie marred by that stupid screen-time-chewing
football game. It’s less fun than the more-watchable
“Patton” and even “Kelly’s Heroes”
(which is FAR longer).
But
as a darker-than-dark comedy about the futility and insanity
of war, it towers above its contemporaries in ways that
should have scared-off George Clooney. It’s the
best film of a seemingly-unfilmmable classic novel we’re
ever going to get.
