Catch-22 (1970)

Official trailer

Catch-22 is Mike Nichols’s 1970 American black comedy adapting Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel.

The film depicts US Air Force bombardier Captain John Yossarian attempting to escape combat duty in the Mediterranean theater of World War II by being declared insane. He learns that any pilot who applies for psychiatric exemption from combat is by that act showing his sanity, since a sane person would want to escape combat. The catch-22 of the title is the regulation that traps him. Alan Arkin plays Yossarian. Martin Balsam plays Colonel Cathcart.

Richard Benjamin plays Major Danby. Art Garfunkel plays Captain Nately. Bob Newhart plays Major Major Major Major. Anthony Perkins plays Chaplain Tappman. Paula Prentiss plays Nurse Duckett. Martin Sheen plays Lieutenant Dobbs. Jon Voight plays Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder. Orson Welles plays General Dreedle. Buck Henry wrote the screenplay. Paramount Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 18 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 24 million dollars on initial release.

There’s more to enjoy here than the film’s reputation suggests, and I enjoy a lot of it. Arkin is terrific, the cast is stacked from top to bottom, and there are stretches where Heller’s madness comes through perfectly. What keeps pulling me out is the sense that Nichols never figured out how to make the book’s structure work on screen and kept trying anyway.

The film is Mike Nichols’s most ambitious project and the principal screen adaptation of one of the classic American novels of the twentieth century.

The Heller source unfolds through deliberate non-linear chronology, recurring scenes that gradually reveal more information, and extensive black humor about military absurdity. The novel’s structural innovations have made it notoriously difficult to film. The 1970 adaptation handles some of the source successfully and fails at other elements. Released the same year as M*A*S*H, Catch-22 lost commercial competition and critical reception comparison.

M*A*S*H is the antiwar film of 1970. Catch-22 is the disappointment. The Heller source remains canonical. The film remains the principal screen attempt that future productions will be measured against.

The Source Problem

Joseph Heller’s novel runs over four hundred pages and uses non-linear chronology that gradually reveals what happened to airman Snowden.

Each scene gets revisited multiple times with additional detail until the reader finally understands the full event. This gives the novel cumulative power that linear chronology couldn’t achieve. The structural innovation matters for the novel’s effect.

Film adaptation requires linear time. The medium doesn’t support the novel’s gradual revelation technique without becoming actively confusing. Buck Henry’s screenplay attempts to preserve some non-linear elements while ordering the major events more conventionally. The compromise produces neither the source’s structural power nor the satisfaction of a clean linear adaptation. The film captures the Heller voice and atmosphere without delivering the novel’s structural argument. The result is partial adaptation that succeeds within its limits and fails the source’s most ambitious element.

This is my main frustration with the picture. The Snowden revelation is the emotional payoff of the whole novel, and the halfway chronology here blunts it. I’d have gone all the way in one direction, fully linear or fully fractured, and trusted the audience to follow.

Arkin as Yossarian

Alan Arkin plays Yossarian with the desperate weariness of a man who has flown too many missions and seen too many friends die. The performance sustains the film. Arkin avoids overplaying the despair into mannerism. He gives Yossarian the practical determination of someone whose remaining goal is survival instead of any larger philosophical position about war.

Arkin is the reason I’d give it a 7 at all. He looks exhausted in every frame, and I believe his panic completely. When he’s on screen the film makes sense.

The role had been considered for several actors before Arkin was cast.

Heller himself initially questioned the casting because Arkin was Jewish and Yossarian’s specific Armenian-American background carried meaning in the novel. Arkin overcame the initial reservations through committed performance that captured what Heller cared about in the character. Source author concerns about casting can be overcome through particular work that addresses the actual character instead of the author’s preconceptions.

Milo Minderbinder

Jon Voight plays Milo Minderbinder as a mess officer who builds a private trading syndicate that eventually involves contracting with the Germans to bomb his own air base. The character represents the source novel’s argument that capitalism continues to work during war and that profit motive will eventually align Americans with their nominal enemies if the financial terms are favorable enough. Voight plays Milo with the cheerful entrepreneurial energy of an American businessman who sees no contradiction between commerce and warfare.

Voight’s Milo is my favorite thing in the film. That cheerful salesman energy while he’s arranging to have his own base bombed is the novel’s satire landing at full strength, and it’s funnier and nastier than anything else Nichols manages.

The character has acquired particular cultural reference standing through later decades.

The Milo Minderbinder name appears in discussions of American defense contracting, international trade with adversarial states, and other circumstances where commerce overrides national interest. The film’s depiction of Milo’s syndicate negotiating with Germans to bomb the American base has become shorthand for institutional corruption that prioritizes profit over patriotism. The character remains a reference point for later American military-industrial commentary.

Does Catch-22 still hold up?

A 7 from me. Arkin holds it together, Voight’s Milo is as sharp as the book, and the cast is loaded with people worth watching. What costs it the higher number is the structure. Nichols and Buck Henry couldn’t translate Heller’s looping chronology, and the compromise leaves the film without the cumulative punch that makes the novel devastating. Watch it if you love Heller, or if you want to see how far ambition can take a film before it runs out.

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