Search - Catch-22 on DVD

MPAA Rating: R Content Advisory: Adult Situations, Adult Language Movie Release: 1970 DVD Release: 05/22/2001 Format: DVD - Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV Audio Tracks: English, French Subtitles: English SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 2 hrs 1 mins Studio: Paramount Members Wishing: 4 Genres: Comedy, Satire, Black Comedy, Military Comedy, Ensemble Film

Director Mike Nichols and writer-actor Buck Henry followed their enormous hit The Graduate (1967) with this timely adaptation of Joseph Heller's satiric antiwar novel. Haunted by the death of a young gunner, all-too-sane Capt. Yossarian (Alan Arkin) wants out of the rest of his WW II bombing missions, but publicity-obsessed commander Colonel Cathcart (Martin Balsam) and his yes man, Colonel Korn (Henry), keep raising the number of missions that Yossarian and his comrades are required to fly. After Doc Daneeka (Jack Gilford) tells Yossarian that he cannot declare him insane if Yossarian knows that it's insane to keep flying, Yossarian tries to play crazy by, among other things, showing up nude in front of despotic General Dreedle (Orson Welles). As all of Yossarian's initially even-keeled friends, such as Nately (Art Garfunkel) and Dobbs (Martin Sheen), genuinely lose their heads, and the troop's supplies are bartered away for profit by the ultra-entrepreneurial Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight), Yossarian realizes that the whole system has lost it, and he can either play along or jump ship. Though not about Vietnam, Catch-22's ludicrous military machinations directly evoked its contemporary context in the Vietnam era. Cathcart and Dreedle care more about the appearance of power than about victory, and Milo cares for money above all, as the complex narrative structure of Yossarian's flashbacks renders the escalating events appropriately surreal. Confident that the combination of a hot director and a popular, culturally relevant novel would spell blockbuster, 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. With audiences opting for Altman's casual Korean War iconoclasm over Nichols' more polished symbolism, the highly anticipated Catch-22 flopped, although the New York Film Critics Circle did acknowledge Arkin and Nichols. Despite this reception, Catch-22's ensemble cast and pungent sensibility effectively underline the insanity of war, Vietnam and otherwise. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Alan Arkin - Capt. Yossarian
Martin Balsam - Col. Cathcart
Richard Benjamin - Maj. Danby
Art Garfunkel - Nately
Jack Gilford - Doc Daneeka
Jon Voight - Milo Minderbinder

For most of us, this DVD will be the first opportunity to see Mike Nichols' Catch-22 uncut and in its proper theatrical edition since its release in 1970. The picture, which was a financial failure on its original release (this reviewer saw it in a neighborhood theater on a double-feature with the original version of The Out-of-Towners), has only been available for the 30 years since in pan-and-scan television prints, which chop off half the image in any given shot and were also heavily censored. Even the AMC cable presentations during 2001 were cut in certain spots (such as the death of Snowden). Curiously, Catch-22 was among the earliest movies to be made available on pre-recorded home video, in the early 1980's -- for around $80, you could buy a grainy looking VHS or Beta tape of the picture, mastered from 16mm and edited for television. It was only ever available on laserdisc in a pan-and-scan edition, and wasn't worth even looking at in that format. The Paramount DVD, on the other hand, is a jewel -- a gorgeous, polished, beautifully set jewel, that starts out on the right foot by capturing the gorgeous night-into-day cinematography in the credit sequence. Now you can appreciate the six months-plus that Nichols and company spent working in Mexico and Rome (contributing indirectly to the break-up of the team of Simon & Garfunkel in the process) on the movie, because this picture is a joy to view, just for the watching; indeed, the color here may be deeper and richer than this reviewer remembers from the theatrical print that he saw a generation ago, and the sound is its equal -- in the take-off sequence in Chapter 2, the gradual drop down in audio levels from the roar of the engines to the silence as the planes wing off of the distance is captured so beautifully that it's worth rewatching, just for the slow reduction from high-resolution cacophony to dead silence. The mix of sound in the following scene, in which Milo (Jon Voight) explains his trading to the colonel (Martin Balsam), their dialogue competing with the crash and explosion of a bomber, is spot-on perfect as well, not a word of a comical inflection lost; and the same goes for the first scene of Alan Arkin's Yosarian and Charles Grodin's Aarfy is also as good as it has ever sounded . . . . In short, this is the way to watch the movie, and on a screen of 20 inches or more, this is the way to see it. The disc opens on a very easy to use menu, and offers several options beyond the English language surround track and a French mono track (or English mono). The trailer was a strange piece of promotion, without any narration or information, just a repeat of the airfield scene in which Alan Arkin and Jack Gilford explain what "Catch-22" means -- the sound of a beating heart then accompanies what was essentially an all-star cast list. The real bonus, however, is the narrative track by Mike Nichols and Steven Soderbergh -- they walk us through every shot of the movie, starting with the magnificent title sequence. Nichols reveals that it was Buck Henry's suggestion, coming off of the success of The Graduate screenplay, to give much of Catch-22 a cyclical flashback structure, taking off from The Graduate's "Scarborough Fair" montage, and representing a fever dream -- the director regrets that fact that most audience members missed the fact that the person who stabs Yosarian is Nately's whore, and reveals that he later wished that he could have walked audiences into the flashback/dream sequence so they understood it better. Nichols also explains how shooting the multiple versions of each scene meant shooting within the same hour or 90 minute time-frame each day for weeks to get the identical natural lighting, which explains the extended shooting schedule. Nichols and Soderbergh aren't the most active or lively narrators, but the fact that they take their time is a virtue -- they luxuriate in the details that went into the design of every shot in so easy-going a fashion that, for example, the first half-hour of the movie, viewed with the narration, slides by in what feels like about 20 minutes. There are a few gaps -- Nichols reveals that Martin Balsam was the second actor in the role of Colonel Cathcart, but never tells us who the first actor was; but we do find out that Buck Henry's readings of Orson Welles's lines pleased Welles no end (Henry's first quotation of a Welles line on camera dates from a 1964 independent feature that he wrote called The Troublemaker). He also tells of his personal indulgences (such as his use of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in the scene involving Yosarian and the prostitute), that somehow worked out amid the meticulous planning, and how filmmakers from Stanley Kubrick to Leni Riefenstahl influenced his creative impulses. The whole disc is akin to the experience of watching (and seeing) the movie for the first time, and it is one of the gems in the Paramount DVD catalog, and even more extraordinary, given that the effort was made on behalf of a movie that really wasn't a terribly big success. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide