CATCH-22 @ 55

It's World War II and Yossarian the bombardier wants out. He asks the squadron doctor to ground him but learns the paradoxical clause of the title. If someone was insane they would not be permitted to fly more missions but only sane people would ask to be relieved of the duty so they are fit to fly more missions. The doctor can't ground Yossarian without compromising his own position. The limit on missions before relief keeps growing, well past the initial twenty-five limit. Meanwhile, the supply officer, Lieutenant Minderbinder is doing deals on goods between the air base and anyone else who'll trade. As a sticky web of rorts and absurdist situations grows the military life looks both like a lark and a huge deadly nightmare.

It was 1970 and any military-based movie that wasn't an old school gung-ho shouter was anti-war and, whatever war it was superficially referring to, always led back to the one the U.S.A. was losing in Vietnam. The conflict that was revealing to Americans through its own tv screens, the wasting decay of old heroism and the way of the good guys, was linked inextricably to anything on screen in a uniform. Claims like destroying a village in order to save it and the atrocity at Mi Lai had rewritten the order and the culture was ready for cynicism and a slap in the face to authority. They were ready, in other words, for Catch-22 and M.A.S.H.

Mike Nicholls who had made a name on TV not only with directorial efforts but as part of a satirical improv act with the great Elaine May (this is worth YouTubeing) but more recently had impressed with his transposition of the Albee stage nerve-fest Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf with the world's celebrity divorcees Burton and Taylor and then the middle class shock comedy of The Graduate. Joseph Heller, author of the source novel, knew Nicholls was right after rejecting the redoubtable Richard Brooks and Richard Quine. Nicholls worked with black comedy stalwart Buck Henry for two years on the screeenplay and, though it diverted from the novel, got the author's full approval. 

Nicholl's cast was of the massive kind touted for major event movies but on a more varied scale: Orson Welles, Martin Balsam, Anthony Perkins, Alan Arkin, John Voigt, Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, Bob Newhart, Charles Grodin. Add pop star Art Garfunkel and you have a castlist that doesn't play fair. Is it a send-up or serious? Nicholls' wrangling of this herd alone should earn him kudos but that he manages to allow someone like Newhart his comedic hysteria but Perkins his restrained explosion and so on, while giving Orson any damn thing he pleased, makes this potentially cutesy comedy a multi-textured tour de force.

This is before you get to astounding sequences in which actors have to deliver layered dialogue against the sights and sounds of massive explosions and a Mitchell bomber crash landing behind them. The aircraft management is, of course, done without a frame of anything but cameras and lighting (but that does include some rear projection): when you see planes, you are really looking at planes. One shot of a downed bomber's tail section in the sea as a distant intact one flies closer to the horizon while dialogue continues will inform or remind you that they really just can't make 'em like this anymore.

But none of this visual dazzle suggests the depth of the satire and how it mounts to epic scale toward the third act. Yossarian (an explosive and hilarious Alan Arkin) with his highly localised mission to escape the military and the war might be rendered insignificant by Milo's rampaging and stinkingly corrupt capitalism, but its essential humanity is never lost to us. By the time Milo is marshalling the streets in control of the local sex work, he has secured control of the war itself on the local scale, resembling both a carnival barker and a fascist dictator. Even more, we want Yossarian out of there.

My memory of this film is one of hearing it from behind the wall of the front seat of my father's Humber on a family outing to the drive-in. After Snowden's guts pour out of his life jacket in Yossarian's motif memory, that's how I "watched the rest of hte film. My brother exaggerated the grisliness of the scene and for years I dared not watch the movie. I had seen the bisection of Hungry joe by McWatt in the light plane and thought that was bad. Then again, I was eight or nine (parents, what were you thinking?) It turned up on Brisbane TV in 1980 and I did watch it. The guts scene was edited and the film played fine without it. Two decades later, on DVD, I was ready for it after a bout half a decade of catching up with horror movies I'd missed from the '80s onwards.

Catch-22 was beaten at the box office both by Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. and Franklin Schaffner's Patton, two very different films, but its reputation has since lifted. It has also aged much better than both. The male-gaze leering that feels juvenile and icky in M.A.S.H. is more diegetic here; the bomber crews' lust is offered as comic but is also saddening. Nurse Duckett gives way better than she gets from Yossarian with a double knee to the groin in a scene that calls for both. The sex workers in Rome are given more economic understanding that Fellini gave them two years later. The film has more compassion than a satire's ethical mudget usually gets. Against its example the swathe of late '60s and early '70s knockabout examples seldom come close to matching it for its underlying gravity.

But that's it, the dark undercurrent's energy saves it the way it saved the following year's Harold and Maude from ever straying into the cultural safety of M.A.S.H. (for all its frat boy jibes) or the still queasy unease of Patton. It's Catch-22 that reaches from the past as a response to an exhausting era. When the time came to take a similar look at the first Gulf War in Three Kings, this was the example that led it.