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| Meta Title | Catch-22 movie review & film summary review: |
| Meta Description | Mike Nichols' "Catch-22" is a disappointment, and not simply because it fails to do justice to the Heller novel. That was almost inevitable, I guess; there |
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| Boilerpipe Text | Mike Nicholsâ âCatch-22â is a disappointment, and not simply because it fails to do justice to the Heller novel. That was almost inevitable, I guess; there was something of a juggling act in Hellerâs eccentric masterpiece. It took him seven years of rewriting to get all the pieces in the air at the same time. For Nichols to pull off the same trick with a movie, which has so many more pieces than a novel, looked impossible.
Still, I thought perhaps Nichols would pull off something. Not a movie that would please the cultists, maybe, but at least a movie that would work on its own terms. His failure on this front is especially disappointing. âCatch-22â the movie is essentially a parasite, depending on the novel for its vitality. Nichols doesnât bring much to the party.
His challenge in directing the movie was to somehow catch Hellerâs tone, that delicate balance between insanity and ice cold logic. Everything in the book was crazy because it made sense, a paradox illustrated in the case of Yossarian, the hero. Yossarian didnât want to fly any more missions over Italy. Why? Because they were shooting at him and someday they would hit him and he would die.
Now that seems like sound reasoning, but (understandably) it doesnât work with most armies. When Yossarian claimed insanity in hopes of being shipped home, Doc Daneeka explained his mistake. Youâd have to be crazy to want to fly dangerous missions over Italy and maybe get killed, right? But Yossarian didnât want to fly those missions. Ergo, Yossarian was sane.
This sort of Alice-in-Wonderland logic is at the heart of Hellerâs book, and somehow he keeps it going. Nichols doesnât. Nichols doesnât even try; if we are to understand Catch-22 and all the other catches, we just have to be familiar with the book. The movie recites speeches and passages from the novel, but doesnât explain them or make them part of its style.
No, Nichols avoids those hard things altogether, and tries to distract us with razzle-dazzle while he sneaks in a couple of easy messages instead. Pushovers. In the first half of the movie, he tells us officers are dumb and war doesnât make sense. In the second half, he tells us war is evil and causes human suffering. We already knew all that; we knew it from every other war movie ever made.
And thatâs the problem: Nichols has gone and made another war movie, the last thing he should have made from âCatch-22.â Nichols has been at pains to put himself on the fashionable side and make a juicy humanist statement against war, not realizing that for Heller World War II was symbolic of a much larger disease: life.
Yossarian is afraid of dying, yes. But we all are. He doesnât want to fly five more missions. Thatâs his problem. We have our own. Yossarian wants out of the Air Corps.; we want to escape from time, to become immortal. But to get out of the Air Corps, or stop time, youâve got to be insane. And no one who wants out is insane. The truly horrifying truth at the center of the Heller novel is that weâre all trapped in that airplane, or in life, and thereâs no escaping death because eventuallyâŚ
But Nichols boils all this down into the stunning revelation that war is hell. And his movie is about war. True, we see little enough actual fighting, but âCatch-22â nevertheless seems to mine its laughs and its âtruthsâ in the same worked-out veins of so many other war movies. It is particularly inspired by the fashionable antiwar movies that preceded it; Richard Lesterâs dreary â
How I Won the War
â belongs on the same double bill.
The movie divides in the middle; the first half is funny, the second is not. The method of the first half is caricature and burlesque. The second half uses overkill and spills bloody guts and sliced bodies all over us. Arenât we getting tired of being bludgeoned with these same old antiwar clubs? Even masochists, after a while, welcome variety.
The caricature of the first half is of the ancient Sgt. Bilko variety. All generals are buffoons and idiots. Colonels and majors are imbeciles without integrity. The general is overplayed by
Orson Welles
; the colonel by
Martin Balsam
; the major by
Bob Newhart
. Balsam is particularly guilty of overacting, but perhaps itâs not entirely his fault.
Nichols seems to have lifted these characters intact from the book, and then instructed his actors to imitate them. With the exception of
Anthony Perkins
, as Chaplain Tappman, none of the featured actors seem to have developed a personal approach to their characters. And since the characters donât come across as human, the situations donât matter as much.
In this connection itâs particularly interesting to contrast Balsamâs lifeless, blustering Col. Cathcart with Roger Bowenâs tremendously effective performance as Col. Blake in âMASH.â Do we still have to be told war is stupid because officers are dumb? This is an enlisted manâs bitch from 16 wars ago; surely war can be stupid on its own, even with bright and ethical officers. Why confuse morality with class consciousness?
The movieâs central character, of course, is Yossarian. Heâs played by
Alan Arkin
, a tremendously gifted actor who gives us Yossarian as a tense, paranoid victim on the edge of a crack-up. This is no doubt Nicholsâ doing, and it misses the point. The more Yossarian squints and grits his teeth and sweats and shakes, the nuttier he seems. And the point of the performance should be precisely that he isnât nuts; that a sane man, using daylight logic, could arrive at the conclusion that the war is crazy, the Air Corps is crazy, everybody is crazy but him.Â
Yossarian gets a real working-over in the second part of the movie, when Nichols goes serious on us. There are scenes of increasing gloom and sobriety, and speeches about life and (especially) death, and the horrifying moment when Yossarian turns the bombardier over and his intestines spill out.
During this period of perhaps 45 minutes, we begin to squirm uneasily because Nichols isnât playing fair. Heâs changed the rules; he made us laugh for the first hour, and now he throws in broken bodies and intestines so that weâll be repelled, and confuse our repulsion with a message. Itâs easy enough to spill those guts; seeing them, we agree that young men should not be killed in war. But Nichols cheats. He doesnât earn our reaction by the way his movie works; he gets it as a knee-jerk response to gore.
That would be bad enough, but watch what he does next. Heâs made us laugh, heâs made us gasp, heâs sickened us with war. Now he sneaks out of the picture with a classic cop-out of an ending.
Yossarian is in a quandary. He canât stay in the Air Corps. He canât go. He has a choice of a court-martial on one hand, or a heroâs medal on the other. He canât make up his mind. Even the chaplain canât help. What to do? Especially (we might add) what to do after the movie has gone serious on us and presented this Moral Crisis.
Well, sir, Yossarian jumps out of the window, runs down to the beach, and starts to paddle a life raft to Sweden. Which could mean heâs finally gone insane for real, but it doesnât. No, this is a custom-made Nichols ending, designed for laughs, and we chuckle at Yossarian paddling out into the Mediterranean.
But wait! As the tiny life raft gets smaller and smaller, weâre reminded of another movie ending. Remember â
The Graduate
,â when Benjamin and his girl raced out of the church and onto the bus, and we roared with laughter as they sped away? Nichols has done the same thing in âCatch-22â that he did in âThe Graduate.â Heâs given us a funny beginning, then switched tones and gone serious. And then tacked on a Great Escape ending which answers none of the questions heâs so painfully raised.
There are some fine moments in the movie, to be sure. But most of them are lifted from the novel, and lifted out of context. If you like the novel, youâll enjoy seeing the bottles switched on that poor guy in the head-to-toe cast. Youâll enjoy Yossarian in the tree, and Mike bombing his own base, and Gen. Dreedle sending the guy out to be shot.
But these are set-pieces from the book; they lose their peculiar effect because theyâre ripped loose from that incredibly complex tapestry where we first found them. Somehow, the movie never does come into focus. Itâs as if Nichols despaired of making a movie of âCatch-22,â and decided to do selections from it instead. |
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# Catch-22
 
[Drama](https://www.rogerebert.com/genre/drama)
121 minutes ⧠R ⧠1970
[Roger Ebert](https://www.rogerebert.com/contributors/roger-ebert)
January 1, 1970
7 min read
Mike Nicholsâ âCatch-22â is a disappointment, and not simply because it fails to do justice to the Heller novel. That was almost inevitable, I guess; there was something of a juggling act in Hellerâs eccentric masterpiece. It took him seven years of rewriting to get all the pieces in the air at the same time. For Nichols to pull off the same trick with a movie, which has so many more pieces than a novel, looked impossible.
Still, I thought perhaps Nichols would pull off something. Not a movie that would please the cultists, maybe, but at least a movie that would work on its own terms. His failure on this front is especially disappointing. âCatch-22â the movie is essentially a parasite, depending on the novel for its vitality. Nichols doesnât bring much to the party.
His challenge in directing the movie was to somehow catch Hellerâs tone, that delicate balance between insanity and ice cold logic. Everything in the book was crazy because it made sense, a paradox illustrated in the case of Yossarian, the hero. Yossarian didnât want to fly any more missions over Italy. Why? Because they were shooting at him and someday they would hit him and he would die.
Now that seems like sound reasoning, but (understandably) it doesnât work with most armies. When Yossarian claimed insanity in hopes of being shipped home, Doc Daneeka explained his mistake. Youâd have to be crazy to want to fly dangerous missions over Italy and maybe get killed, right? But Yossarian didnât want to fly those missions. Ergo, Yossarian was sane.
This sort of Alice-in-Wonderland logic is at the heart of Hellerâs book, and somehow he keeps it going. Nichols doesnât. Nichols doesnât even try; if we are to understand Catch-22 and all the other catches, we just have to be familiar with the book. The movie recites speeches and passages from the novel, but doesnât explain them or make them part of its style.
No, Nichols avoids those hard things altogether, and tries to distract us with razzle-dazzle while he sneaks in a couple of easy messages instead. Pushovers. In the first half of the movie, he tells us officers are dumb and war doesnât make sense. In the second half, he tells us war is evil and causes human suffering. We already knew all that; we knew it from every other war movie ever made.
And thatâs the problem: Nichols has gone and made another war movie, the last thing he should have made from âCatch-22.â Nichols has been at pains to put himself on the fashionable side and make a juicy humanist statement against war, not realizing that for Heller World War II was symbolic of a much larger disease: life.
Yossarian is afraid of dying, yes. But we all are. He doesnât want to fly five more missions. Thatâs his problem. We have our own. Yossarian wants out of the Air Corps.; we want to escape from time, to become immortal. But to get out of the Air Corps, or stop time, youâve got to be insane. And no one who wants out is insane. The truly horrifying truth at the center of the Heller novel is that weâre all trapped in that airplane, or in life, and thereâs no escaping death because eventuallyâŚ
But Nichols boils all this down into the stunning revelation that war is hell. And his movie is about war. True, we see little enough actual fighting, but âCatch-22â nevertheless seems to mine its laughs and its âtruthsâ in the same worked-out veins of so many other war movies. It is particularly inspired by the fashionable antiwar movies that preceded it; Richard Lesterâs dreary â[How I Won the War](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/how-i-won-the-war-1968)â belongs on the same double bill.
The movie divides in the middle; the first half is funny, the second is not. The method of the first half is caricature and burlesque. The second half uses overkill and spills bloody guts and sliced bodies all over us. Arenât we getting tired of being bludgeoned with these same old antiwar clubs? Even masochists, after a while, welcome variety.
The caricature of the first half is of the ancient Sgt. Bilko variety. All generals are buffoons and idiots. Colonels and majors are imbeciles without integrity. The general is overplayed by [Orson Welles](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/orson-welles); the colonel by [Martin Balsam](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/martin-balsam); the major by [Bob Newhart](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/bob-newhart). Balsam is particularly guilty of overacting, but perhaps itâs not entirely his fault.
Nichols seems to have lifted these characters intact from the book, and then instructed his actors to imitate them. With the exception of [Anthony Perkins](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/anthony-perkins), as Chaplain Tappman, none of the featured actors seem to have developed a personal approach to their characters. And since the characters donât come across as human, the situations donât matter as much.
In this connection itâs particularly interesting to contrast Balsamâs lifeless, blustering Col. Cathcart with Roger Bowenâs tremendously effective performance as Col. Blake in âMASH.â Do we still have to be told war is stupid because officers are dumb? This is an enlisted manâs bitch from 16 wars ago; surely war can be stupid on its own, even with bright and ethical officers. Why confuse morality with class consciousness?
The movieâs central character, of course, is Yossarian. Heâs played by [Alan Arkin](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/alan-arkin), a tremendously gifted actor who gives us Yossarian as a tense, paranoid victim on the edge of a crack-up. This is no doubt Nicholsâ doing, and it misses the point. The more Yossarian squints and grits his teeth and sweats and shakes, the nuttier he seems. And the point of the performance should be precisely that he isnât nuts; that a sane man, using daylight logic, could arrive at the conclusion that the war is crazy, the Air Corps is crazy, everybody is crazy but him.
Yossarian gets a real working-over in the second part of the movie, when Nichols goes serious on us. There are scenes of increasing gloom and sobriety, and speeches about life and (especially) death, and the horrifying moment when Yossarian turns the bombardier over and his intestines spill out.
During this period of perhaps 45 minutes, we begin to squirm uneasily because Nichols isnât playing fair. Heâs changed the rules; he made us laugh for the first hour, and now he throws in broken bodies and intestines so that weâll be repelled, and confuse our repulsion with a message. Itâs easy enough to spill those guts; seeing them, we agree that young men should not be killed in war. But Nichols cheats. He doesnât earn our reaction by the way his movie works; he gets it as a knee-jerk response to gore.
That would be bad enough, but watch what he does next. Heâs made us laugh, heâs made us gasp, heâs sickened us with war. Now he sneaks out of the picture with a classic cop-out of an ending.
Yossarian is in a quandary. He canât stay in the Air Corps. He canât go. He has a choice of a court-martial on one hand, or a heroâs medal on the other. He canât make up his mind. Even the chaplain canât help. What to do? Especially (we might add) what to do after the movie has gone serious on us and presented this Moral Crisis.
Well, sir, Yossarian jumps out of the window, runs down to the beach, and starts to paddle a life raft to Sweden. Which could mean heâs finally gone insane for real, but it doesnât. No, this is a custom-made Nichols ending, designed for laughs, and we chuckle at Yossarian paddling out into the Mediterranean.
But wait! As the tiny life raft gets smaller and smaller, weâre reminded of another movie ending. Remember â[The Graduate](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-graduate-1997),â when Benjamin and his girl raced out of the church and onto the bus, and we roared with laughter as they sped away? Nichols has done the same thing in âCatch-22â that he did in âThe Graduate.â Heâs given us a funny beginning, then switched tones and gone serious. And then tacked on a Great Escape ending which answers none of the questions heâs so painfully raised.
There are some fine moments in the movie, to be sure. But most of them are lifted from the novel, and lifted out of context. If you like the novel, youâll enjoy seeing the bottles switched on that poor guy in the head-to-toe cast. Youâll enjoy Yossarian in the tree, and Mike bombing his own base, and Gen. Dreedle sending the guy out to be shot.
But these are set-pieces from the book; they lose their peculiar effect because theyâre ripped loose from that incredibly complex tapestry where we first found them. Somehow, the movie never does come into focus. Itâs as if Nichols despaired of making a movie of âCatch-22,â and decided to do selections from it instead.
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Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
#### Catch-22
[Drama](https://www.rogerebert.com/genre/drama)
 
121 minutes ⧠R ⧠1970
- #### Director
- [Mike Nichols](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/mike-nichols)
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| Readable Markdown | Mike Nicholsâ âCatch-22â is a disappointment, and not simply because it fails to do justice to the Heller novel. That was almost inevitable, I guess; there was something of a juggling act in Hellerâs eccentric masterpiece. It took him seven years of rewriting to get all the pieces in the air at the same time. For Nichols to pull off the same trick with a movie, which has so many more pieces than a novel, looked impossible.
Still, I thought perhaps Nichols would pull off something. Not a movie that would please the cultists, maybe, but at least a movie that would work on its own terms. His failure on this front is especially disappointing. âCatch-22â the movie is essentially a parasite, depending on the novel for its vitality. Nichols doesnât bring much to the party.
His challenge in directing the movie was to somehow catch Hellerâs tone, that delicate balance between insanity and ice cold logic. Everything in the book was crazy because it made sense, a paradox illustrated in the case of Yossarian, the hero. Yossarian didnât want to fly any more missions over Italy. Why? Because they were shooting at him and someday they would hit him and he would die.
Now that seems like sound reasoning, but (understandably) it doesnât work with most armies. When Yossarian claimed insanity in hopes of being shipped home, Doc Daneeka explained his mistake. Youâd have to be crazy to want to fly dangerous missions over Italy and maybe get killed, right? But Yossarian didnât want to fly those missions. Ergo, Yossarian was sane.
This sort of Alice-in-Wonderland logic is at the heart of Hellerâs book, and somehow he keeps it going. Nichols doesnât. Nichols doesnât even try; if we are to understand Catch-22 and all the other catches, we just have to be familiar with the book. The movie recites speeches and passages from the novel, but doesnât explain them or make them part of its style.
No, Nichols avoids those hard things altogether, and tries to distract us with razzle-dazzle while he sneaks in a couple of easy messages instead. Pushovers. In the first half of the movie, he tells us officers are dumb and war doesnât make sense. In the second half, he tells us war is evil and causes human suffering. We already knew all that; we knew it from every other war movie ever made.
And thatâs the problem: Nichols has gone and made another war movie, the last thing he should have made from âCatch-22.â Nichols has been at pains to put himself on the fashionable side and make a juicy humanist statement against war, not realizing that for Heller World War II was symbolic of a much larger disease: life.
Yossarian is afraid of dying, yes. But we all are. He doesnât want to fly five more missions. Thatâs his problem. We have our own. Yossarian wants out of the Air Corps.; we want to escape from time, to become immortal. But to get out of the Air Corps, or stop time, youâve got to be insane. And no one who wants out is insane. The truly horrifying truth at the center of the Heller novel is that weâre all trapped in that airplane, or in life, and thereâs no escaping death because eventuallyâŚ
But Nichols boils all this down into the stunning revelation that war is hell. And his movie is about war. True, we see little enough actual fighting, but âCatch-22â nevertheless seems to mine its laughs and its âtruthsâ in the same worked-out veins of so many other war movies. It is particularly inspired by the fashionable antiwar movies that preceded it; Richard Lesterâs dreary â[How I Won the War](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/how-i-won-the-war-1968)â belongs on the same double bill.
The movie divides in the middle; the first half is funny, the second is not. The method of the first half is caricature and burlesque. The second half uses overkill and spills bloody guts and sliced bodies all over us. Arenât we getting tired of being bludgeoned with these same old antiwar clubs? Even masochists, after a while, welcome variety.
The caricature of the first half is of the ancient Sgt. Bilko variety. All generals are buffoons and idiots. Colonels and majors are imbeciles without integrity. The general is overplayed by [Orson Welles](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/orson-welles); the colonel by [Martin Balsam](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/martin-balsam); the major by [Bob Newhart](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/bob-newhart). Balsam is particularly guilty of overacting, but perhaps itâs not entirely his fault.
Nichols seems to have lifted these characters intact from the book, and then instructed his actors to imitate them. With the exception of [Anthony Perkins](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/anthony-perkins), as Chaplain Tappman, none of the featured actors seem to have developed a personal approach to their characters. And since the characters donât come across as human, the situations donât matter as much.
In this connection itâs particularly interesting to contrast Balsamâs lifeless, blustering Col. Cathcart with Roger Bowenâs tremendously effective performance as Col. Blake in âMASH.â Do we still have to be told war is stupid because officers are dumb? This is an enlisted manâs bitch from 16 wars ago; surely war can be stupid on its own, even with bright and ethical officers. Why confuse morality with class consciousness?
The movieâs central character, of course, is Yossarian. Heâs played by [Alan Arkin](https://www.rogerebert.com/cast-and-crew/alan-arkin), a tremendously gifted actor who gives us Yossarian as a tense, paranoid victim on the edge of a crack-up. This is no doubt Nicholsâ doing, and it misses the point. The more Yossarian squints and grits his teeth and sweats and shakes, the nuttier he seems. And the point of the performance should be precisely that he isnât nuts; that a sane man, using daylight logic, could arrive at the conclusion that the war is crazy, the Air Corps is crazy, everybody is crazy but him.
Yossarian gets a real working-over in the second part of the movie, when Nichols goes serious on us. There are scenes of increasing gloom and sobriety, and speeches about life and (especially) death, and the horrifying moment when Yossarian turns the bombardier over and his intestines spill out.
During this period of perhaps 45 minutes, we begin to squirm uneasily because Nichols isnât playing fair. Heâs changed the rules; he made us laugh for the first hour, and now he throws in broken bodies and intestines so that weâll be repelled, and confuse our repulsion with a message. Itâs easy enough to spill those guts; seeing them, we agree that young men should not be killed in war. But Nichols cheats. He doesnât earn our reaction by the way his movie works; he gets it as a knee-jerk response to gore.
That would be bad enough, but watch what he does next. Heâs made us laugh, heâs made us gasp, heâs sickened us with war. Now he sneaks out of the picture with a classic cop-out of an ending.
Yossarian is in a quandary. He canât stay in the Air Corps. He canât go. He has a choice of a court-martial on one hand, or a heroâs medal on the other. He canât make up his mind. Even the chaplain canât help. What to do? Especially (we might add) what to do after the movie has gone serious on us and presented this Moral Crisis.
Well, sir, Yossarian jumps out of the window, runs down to the beach, and starts to paddle a life raft to Sweden. Which could mean heâs finally gone insane for real, but it doesnât. No, this is a custom-made Nichols ending, designed for laughs, and we chuckle at Yossarian paddling out into the Mediterranean.
But wait! As the tiny life raft gets smaller and smaller, weâre reminded of another movie ending. Remember â[The Graduate](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-graduate-1997),â when Benjamin and his girl raced out of the church and onto the bus, and we roared with laughter as they sped away? Nichols has done the same thing in âCatch-22â that he did in âThe Graduate.â Heâs given us a funny beginning, then switched tones and gone serious. And then tacked on a Great Escape ending which answers none of the questions heâs so painfully raised.
There are some fine moments in the movie, to be sure. But most of them are lifted from the novel, and lifted out of context. If you like the novel, youâll enjoy seeing the bottles switched on that poor guy in the head-to-toe cast. Youâll enjoy Yossarian in the tree, and Mike bombing his own base, and Gen. Dreedle sending the guy out to be shot.
But these are set-pieces from the book; they lose their peculiar effect because theyâre ripped loose from that incredibly complex tapestry where we first found them. Somehow, the movie never does come into focus. Itâs as if Nichols despaired of making a movie of âCatch-22,â and decided to do selections from it instead. |
| Shard | 97 (laksa) |
| Root Hash | 7554834309041482497 |
| Unparsed URL | com,rogerebert!www,/reviews/catch-22-1970 s443 |