No Jokes, No M1nd
Kriegel, Leonard
WHEN I CAME TO SEE Mike Nichols's film version of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the lines on both sides of the Sutton Theater were already long. There are, apparently, a large number of New...
...Mr...
...The trouble is that the film confirms what one had begun to suspect: Catch-22 was a vastly overrated novel that was as much part of the cultural disintegration it claimed to be exposing as an attack on that disintegration...
...But here they are, dusted off and presented to us with a kind of pristine innocence...
...Italians are cowardly soldiers but lovable, crafty, conniving little men...
...War is not only hell, as General Sherman supposedly said, it is also perfectly attuned to the "good guys, bad guys" psychology so characteristic of our America...
...The rather circular structure is held together by repeated glimpses of Snowden's death, the central metaphor to the world of Catch-22...
...It is an attempt to endow Yossarian with stature as a character...
...It was this quality that made the novel funny for the first 100 or so pages and difficult to get through beyond that...
...NICHOLS STRUCTURES THE FILM through the decision Yossarian must make: whether to cooperate with Col...
...None of the characters in the novel, not even Yossarian, are interesting as people...
...Nichols's chief problem in making the film was not structural...
...But what failed in Catch-22 is not film as a medium but the novel's lack of substance...
...Nichols has eliminated Heller's obsession with the vaudeville comedian's shtick, his need to pulverize his audience like an intellectual Milton Berle...
...The logic of the film reproduces this...
...sexual abstinence leads to rape and murder...
...Every fashionable intellectual cliche that one can find appears sooner or later in the novel (i.e., only capitalists profit by wars and their allegiance is strictly to the dollar...
...And he simply doesn't work, not even when contrasted—as he is at every conceivable opportunity—with Dreedle and Cathcart and Minderbinder, all of them inhumane caricatures created in the name of humanism...
...And one would have supposed that in 1970 a man as intelligent as Nichols would realize that the idea that only capitalists like Milo Minderbinder benefit from war leaves a great deal to be desired, as does the equally silly idea that people who practice sexual abstinence, like the All-American boy Aardvark, wind up rapists and murderers...
...And whatever real protest the film could have made against war is dissipated in that romanticism...
...all young men who fight wars are decent, sexual human beings, doomed to Snowden's fate, their guts spilling out in technicolor...
...There are, apparently, a large number of New Yorkers willing to spend $3.50 for a brief dose of humanistic piety...
...Nichols has created a "message" film and the sincerity of his message is something I am quite willing to accept...
...But the morality is so stagey and Yossarian himself so one-dimensional that the reader grows less and less comfortable with him as the laughs become fewer and fewer, a feeling accentuated by the film where the slapstick has been reduced to a minimum and Yossarian's goodness and purity have all the impact of a girl scout cookie and a glass of milk...
...In a section devoted to following Yossarian as he walks through Rome's darkened streets, meant to impress us with the Hogarthian bestiality of mankind, policemen flog men in the streets, whores perform fellatio in darkened hallways, drivers beat their horses...
...MOVIES Alan Arkin's portrayal of Yossarian is sympathetic and even, at moments, moving...
...Catchcart and gain his release from flying any further missions by making Catchcart a hero in the public eye, or to flee, as did the seemingly witless Orr before him, to the modern pacifist Nirvana, Sweden...
...But the price is that the novel's Yossarian is revealed as just so much papier-mache...
...Nichols has come in for a great deal of criticism for Catch-22, but this is criticism which seems to me, for the most part, misplaced...
...The lack of characterization, the absence of any moral conflict, the wearisome intrusion of an author trying to prove his prowess as a gag man, the tin-foil settings—all made a second reading arduous...
...That he was defeated in this intention was probably inevitable, but it was certainly not for want of trying...
...That he didn't remains to his credit, even if the novel's humor has found no adequate replacement here...
...Unlike most novelists whose work is used by screenwriters, Heller cannot complain that he has been artistically bludgeoned...
...It was, rather, to endow characters whose sole function in the novel seemed to be the delivery of funny lines—what might be thought of as the elevation of street corner dozens into a literary technique—with meaningful existence...
...the stupidity of colonels is exceeded only by the imbecility of generals...
...Yossarian is a key to Heller's romanticism...
...It is this, rather than Snowden's erupting guts, that is shocking...
...All wars are unjust...
...But if one returned to it, after the jokes were no longer fresh, it was almost impossible to get through...
...Catch-22 reduced all existence to the level of caricature...
...army nurses and doctors are indifferent to death when they are not out-and-out sadists...
...This serves a dual purpose...
...whores have hearts of gold, weep easily, and love their occupation...
...But none of it registers, for not only war but all human activity in this film has been made banal through being made general...
...WHEN I CAME TO SEE Mike Nichols's film version of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the lines on both sides of the Sutton Theater were already long...
...If anything, the film is structurally tighter than the novel...
...all generals are stupid, fat-faced bastards accompanied by big-breasted overlylipsticked WACs...
...From the opening shot of a sublime sunrise ripped apart by the roar of bombers taking off from their hot and dusty base, while the sunrise surrenders to smoke and frightened birds and roaring motors, to destroy nature's harmonious balance (with one eye on Wordsworth's ghost, the other on the ecologists: "War is bad for children and other living things," a proposition with which it is impossible to quarrel), to the conclusion in which Yossarian flees his hospital room to put out to sea in a raft bound for Sweden, the film's romanticism serves as the handmaiden to its shallow morality...
...Aimed at the young in heart and mind, Catch-22 can be absorbed into the general style of the times: "revolutionary" zilch...
...The ultimate effect of Catch-22 brought to life on the screen is to force us to stare at the emperor's nakedness...
...Heller's novel was improvisational, a kind of literary spiel that was, at moments, extremely funny and simply never let up for a page...
...Nichols and screenwriter-actor Buck Henry took the job of translating the novel to the screen seriously...
...Nichols's direction may be slow, but it is also uncompromising in the task he set for himself...
...For this is a world in which evil is generalized to the point of being incidental...
...Arkin does not play the role for laughs, which would have been easy for him to do...
...The war, like the world in which it is taking place, simply does not register...
...at the same time, it tries to force the viewer into seeing the horror of war...
...Nichols chose—and the decision is one for which he must be praised—to create a film that would stand not on the slapstick humor of the novel (after the opening scenes, the film is not even particularly funny) but on the antiwar and anticapitalist themes hidden beneath the humorous fat of the novel...
...He can, of course, be legitimately faulted for such scenes as those in the Roman bordello where the old Italian gigolo preaches his philosophy of staying alive, accompanied by the expected lines about how smart the Italians are for not being able to fight...
...He succeeds in creating coherence out of an incoherent world, and it is exactly here that he betrays the novel...
...It is not by accident that the novel still finds its greatest favor among devotees of late-night TV talk shows...
...He could have, of course, chosen to pursue Heller's slapstick and arrived with a film in which the hollowness was disguised by a series of rapidly exploding sight gags...
...His claim on our sympathies ultimately amounts to Heller's having endowed him with a certain moral purity, the result, apparently, of the fact that in a world filled with Minderbinders, Dreedles, and Cathcarts, Yossarian is a nice Armenian boy who wants to live...
...Given the limitations of what they had to work with, they have done a creditable job...
Vol. 18 • February 1971 • No. 1
