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.

When I first saw "Catch-22" I couldn't believe it was made in 1970; the structure of this film is so modern it could have been made yesterday. Frame for frame a masterpiece of storytelling unfolds before your eyes; a satire, a comedy, a tragedy: superb and unforgettable. The surreal humor captures the craziness of war in a way - I think - no other movie does.The film was released at around the same time as the somewhat similarly themed "M*A*S*H", and while Altman's movie was a hit, "Catch-22" bombed at the box office. In retrospect I would say that both films have aged very well, but Catch-22 offers a much more cinematic experience and has a narrative that is as modern as anything that's being released today. One of my favorite movies of all time.Favorite films: http://www.IMDb.com/list/mkjOKvqlSBs/Lesser-known Masterpieces: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls070242495/Favorite Low-Budget and B-Movies: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls054808375/Favorite TV-Shows reviewed: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls075552387/

I could never really quite get into MASH and that baseball game is wasted on me. Mike Nicol's Catch 22, though, that's different. It's instant. Straight away it just clicks as being a film that is warped enough to be well outside anybody's box. I know that MASH is Vietnam and this an Italian airbase somewhere in the Med in WW2, but from here-on in, there are big similarities.Alan Arkin has never been better and though I haven't read the book and probably never will, you can tell straight away that he was born for the role. His only other performance that comes near was his Oscar winning one as grumpy old uncle in Little Miss Sunshine. As the US air-force captain hell-bent on proving his insanity, Capt Yossarian has to try and convince everybody, especially himself.The film is on so many delicious levels that it can be seen many times and a different stance or joke is revealed that you didn't see before. I'm on my third. Dreams, nightmares, psychosis, nudity, superb, adventurous cinematography AND Orson Welles, that's one helluva combination. The stunts are worthy of expensive 'proper' war films and it must have been a very brave film for Nicols to even contemplate making.There's one hell of a cast too, aside of Arkin and Welles - Anthony Perkins, Richard Benjamin, Art Garfunkel, Martin Balsam, Jon Voight and Martin Sheen - that's an invite list to the Oscars!My policy with such off the wall movies is not to try and understand them, unless it comes to me. Logic and reasoning can be an awful barrier to enjoyment, sometimes! For this reason alone, I'm not even going to try to explain the plot here.You'll want to watch Catch 22 for its WW2 satire, the imaginative direction, the well executed stunts and maybe above all these, the cast - and the humour that is so unreal, it's almost happening outside of one's mind and body.

Directed by Mike Nichols, the screenplay by Buck Henry is totally brilliant. The novel by Joseph Heller is itself brilliantly written, with nuances and subtleties many readers miss. Henry caught the gist of the novel and got it on screen, using the device of returning again and again to an airplane with a scene we don't fully see, showing us a little more each time, then fading to white as we get the voice over of the next scene. We get the circularity of the novel and the scattered sanity of Yossarian as he struggles to keep his shredded reality less tattered if not totally intact.The cast is incredible. Nichols gives us an all-star cast without the drivel of such disasters as "A Bridge Too Far" and "The Longest Day." The cast includes Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Buck Henry, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, John Voight, and Orson Welles, among many, many others.Henry had to make a movie out of the novel, so he made some hard choices, excising characters and situations that some find disappointing. My suggestion is to see the movie as the movie without comparing it to the book; on the other hand, I'm astounded at how well Henry captured the essence of Heller and his work. Jon Voight is chilling as Minderbinder, who is in my very humble opinion the lynchpin of the movie. When Minderbinder tells Yossarian, "Then they'll understand," the full impact of World War II (and who's the real enemy) shatters Yossarian's weakening sanity.For me the end of the novel and the end of the movie are unsatisfying, but the ride is still worth it.Trivial notes concerning the people involved in the movie. Mike Nichols also directed "The Graduate," with Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. Charles Grodin (Arfy Aardvark) was supposed to play Benjamin, but couldn't agree on a salary with Nichols, so Bancroft suggest Dustin Hoffman to Nichols - she'd heard about Hoffman from her husband, Mel Brooks, who had just signed Hoffman for his movie "The Producers." Hoffman bailed on Brooks and did "The Graduate" instead. Norman Fell (Sgt. Towser) played Benjamin's landlord in a short scene (also involving Richard Dreyfus) in "The Graduate." Bob Balaban (Capt. Orr) was in "Midnight Cowboy" with Jon Voight (and Dustin Hoffman, of course). Buck Henry wrote a TV series for Richard Benjamin (Major Danby), who is married to Paula Prentiss (Nurse Duckett). Orson Welles (General Dreedle) did the voice-over narration for Mel Brooks's "History of the World." Mel Brooks and Buck Henry developed "Get Smart." Bob Newhart (Major Major Major) and Peter Bonerz (Capt. McWatt) were in The Bob Newhart Show together. And Susanne Benton (Dreedle's WAC) had a completely unrelated role in the totally unrelated "A Boy and his Dog." Hollywood is a small town.