Catch-22 (film)

Orson Welles first tried to buy the rights to Heller's novel to independently produce and direct it in 1962, but was unsuccessful. He wound up cast in the role of General Dreedle.

Columbia Pictures purchased the rights to it in 1965 and attempted to develop the film with Richard Brooks or Richard Quine as potential directors, while Jack Lemmon was considered as Captain Yossarian. Heller grew dissatisfied with the two as he believed they were “incapable of pursuing the wildly satirical (and anti-military) point of view of his novel.” The studio subsequently sold the rights to Martin Ransohoff at Filmways in 1967, which had already hired Mike Nichols to direct. Nichols originally announced that principal photography would begin in “late 1967-early 1968” in Yugoslavia and Italy. However, the project was delayed for several years as Nichols and John Calley searched for Italian terrain that had not been destroyed by World War II.

Daily Variety in the period 1967-69 reported that Andre Previn would score the picture and that Nichols sought to cast Walter Matthau and Al Pacino in the movie, but none of them participated in the picture. Stacy Keach was also cast in the film before departing a month prior to filming.[2]

Nichols eventually decided on Mexico as the primary shooting location of the film. Production began on January 13, 1969, at an air field constructed for the film on the Pacific Coast of Mexico near Guaymas, Sonora. The filmmakers spent $180,000 building a five-mile runway specifically for the film and an additional $250,000 for a 6,000-ft. runway. After a week of filming, Nichols sent back 200 of the American extras in order to give the base in the film a more isolated atmosphere. Welles filmed his cameo appearance as General Dreedle in eight days. Some filming also took place at the Palazzo Farnese and the Palazzo Navona in Rome. Production concluded in August 1969 after a final two months of interior filming in Hollywood.[2]

The adaptation changed the book's plot. Several story arcs are left out, and many characters in the movie speak dialogue and experience events of other characters in the book.[3] Despite the changes in the screenplay, Heller approved of the film, according to a commentary by Nichols and Steven Soderbergh included on a DVD release.[4] According to Nichols, Heller was particularly impressed with a few scenes and bits of dialogue Henry created for the film, and said he wished he could have included them in the novel.[5]

The pacing of the novel Catch-22 is frenetic, its tenor intellectual, and its tone largely absurdist,[6] interspersed with brief moments of gritty, almost horrific, realism. The novel did not follow a normal chronological progression; rather, it was told as a series of different and often (seemingly, until later) unrelated events, most from the point of view of the central character Yossarian. The film simplified the plot.[7][8]

B-25 from the movie Catch-22.

Paramount assigned a $17 million budget to the production and planned to film key flying scenes for six weeks, but the aerial sequences required six months of camera work, resulting in the bombers flying about 1,500 hours.[9] They appear on screen for approximately 10 minutes.[10][Note 1]

Catch-22 is renowned for its role in saving the B-25 Mitchell aircraft from possible extinction.[11] The film's budget accommodated 17 flyable B-25 Mitchells, and one hulk was acquired in Mexico, and flown with landing gear down to the Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico filming location.[4] The aircraft was burned and destroyed in the crash landing scene. The wreck was then buried in the ground by the runway, where it remains.[12]

For the film, prop upper turrets were installed, and to represent different models, several aircraft had turrets installed behind the wings representing early (B-25C/D type) aircraft.[10] Initially, the camera ships also had mock turrets installed, but problems with buffeting necessitated their removal.[13]

Many of the "Tallmantz Air Force fleet" went on to careers in films and television, before being sold as surplus.[14] Fifteen of the 18 bombers remain intact, including one displayed at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.[15]

Second unit director John Jordan refused to wear a harness during a bomber scene and fell out of the open tail turret 4,000 ft (1,200 m) into the Pacific Ocean to his death.[2][16]

Catch-22 was released for home viewing on VHS and Beta in 1979, Laserdisc in 1982, and SelectaVision CED disc. Some of the music was changed for the 1992 VHS Hi-Fi re-release.

Catch-22 was re-released to DVD by Paramount Home Video on May 21, 2013; a previous version was released on May 11, 2001. The DVD contains commentary by director Mike Nichols moderated by Steven Soderbergh.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 81% of 31 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "Catch-22 takes entertainingly chaotic aim at the insanity of armed combat, supported by a terrific cast and smart, funny work from Buck Henry and Mike Nichols."[19] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 70 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[20]

Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised the film as "the most moving, the most intelligent, the most humane--oh, to hell with it!--it's the best American film I've seen this year." He felt the film was "complete and consistent", and commended its balance of comedy and seriousness as well as the ensemble cast.[7] In a cover story about Mike Nichols, Time wrote "It is the book's cold rage that he has nurtured. In the jokes that matter, the film is as hard as a diamond, cold to the touch and brilliant to the eye. To Nichols, Catch-22 is 'about dying'; to Arkin, it is 'about selfishness'; to audiences, it will be a memorable horror comedy of war, with the accent on horror."[21] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3 stars out of 4, calling it "a disappointment, and not simply because it fails to do justice to the Heller novel." He noted that the film "recites speeches and passages from the novel, but doesn't 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."[22] Similarly, Gene Siskel for the Chicago Tribune gave the film 2+1⁄2 stars out of four arguing the film "spends too much time accommodating a huge cast", and instead the film should have properly focused on "Yossarian's combat, with the catch into his head where it belongs". Nevertheless, he wrote "The film's technical credits, photography, and special effects are uniformly outstanding. Of the huge supporting cast, Dick Benjamin, Bob Newhart, and Jack Gilford are the best."[23] Charles Champlin, reviewing for the Los Angeles Times, felt that Catch-22 is awfully good, and also a disappointment: Chilly brilliant at its best but flawed at last by its detachment and by its failure to catch fire and give off heat. Its fury is cold and intellectual and cannot reach us or involve us at gut level."[24]

Richard Schickel in LIFE panned the film, saying it failed to translate what made Joseph Heller's novel a generational phenomenon to the screen. In his review entitled "One of our novels is missing," Schickel wrote:

Mike Nichols' movie version of the novel is, in tone, as hot and heavy as the original was cool and light. Charitably, one might say that he was seeking the visual equivalent of the book's verbal style. But he failed abysmally, and in the process he and Writer Buck Henry have mislaid every bit of the humor that made the novel emotionally bearable and esthetically memorable, replacing it with desperately earnest proof they hate war.... [T]he key to the film's almost total failure lies in its restructuring of the novel. It is shot as if it were a single hallucinatory flashback suffered by Yossarian, Heller's Everyman-turned-Bombardier.... Far from seeming wild and free, this dream structure struck me as inhumanly manipulative, for it imposes on both the material and the audience a single, simple point of view: I'm crazy, they're crazy, we're all crazy in this crazy world. The characters can't wiggle free of it and live for so much as a single wayward, truly human moment. We, as an audience, are never allowed to think, feel, respond as we will. We are as trapped at a single level of response as ever we were in those hack war movies Nichols mocks.[25]

Upon the initial release, Catch-22 earned US$24.9 million out of the budget of US$18 million, earning it a spot in the top ten box office hits of 1970, but falling short of being profitable to Fox.[26] It was director Mike Nichols' third film, after the acclaimed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. It was not regarded as a comparable success, earning less money and critical acclaim than the film version of MASH, another war-themed black comedy released earlier the same year. In addition, some critics believed that the film appeared as Americans were becoming more resentful of the bitter and ugly experience of the Vietnam War, leading to a general decline in the interest of war pictures, with the notable exceptions of MASH and Patton.[9] Critic Lucia Bozzola wrote "Paramount spent a great deal of money on Catch-22, but it wound up getting trumped by another 1970 antiwar farce: Robert Altman's MASH."[27] Film historians and reviewers Jack Harwick and Ed Schnepf characterized it as deeply flawed, noting that Henry's screenplay was disjointed and that the only redeeming features were the limited aerial sequences.[28]