Even if Pearl Harbor is a dog, it will have done its duty by encouraging DVD companies to release this Spring's bounty of war movies.  Catch-22 is nobody's favorite film, but it's still an impressive show - funny, bizarre, and remote at the same time.  Its all-star casting was a major deal in 1970, and it seemed every hot actor wanted a crack at one of Heller's dozens of weird characters.

Every scene in Catch-22 has a fascination for the serious film fan, the kind of kick that doesn't translate to a regular audience.  It plays like a shifting series of wild standup routines, that start with black comedy and become ever more strange.  All these familiar faces and interesting chararacters behaving like madmen ...  It's as if the clown comedians in It's a Mad Mad World entertained us by shooting innocent bystanders, or dying in gory car crashes.  The dialogue is brilliant but cryptic; there's always the sense that we are going to be victimized for trying to care about what happens to these reluctant bomber pilots.

The movie is mounted on a giant scale, with at least a dozen B-25 airplanes enlisted to provide an appropriately grandiose bombing campaign.  Much of the film is shot in long takes with complicated airplane maneuvers in the background; the flyers complained that Nichols, an un-technical director, burned up their air-cooled engines by making them wait in place on the hot Mexican runways.  This is the film where helicopter cameraman John Jordan, who had already sacrificed a foot shooting You Only Live Twice, lost his life in yet another aerial filming accident.  David Watkin's camerawork is breathtaking, capturing the feel of the bright sunlight without making us squint to see faces, and lighting some night scenes with only the illumination of the special effects explosions.

As Milo Minderbinder's influence turns both the airfield and the local town into a horrorshow of vice and corruption, the movie becomes a grotesque satyricon, whose overall point gets lost in the excess.  It explains the madness behind Yossarian's Catch-22 (only sane men may be excused from combat, but because war is insane, any man rational enough to want to avoid fighting must be sane, and therefore must fight) but loses most of the audience with what seems a horror version of a service comedy like Operation Mad Ball.  On DVD, Catch-22 is fascinating from a production point of view.  In today's regulated industry, it's exhilarating to think that once upon a time, filmmakers took so many millions to make such totally abstract movies.

Paramount's DVD of Catch-22 captures the beauty of David Watkin's photography in all its brilliance, and the remixed 5.1 audio is exceptionally clear.  There's a trailer and a photo gallery, but the E-ticket here is Mike Nichols' very illuminating commentary, prompted by director Steven Soderbergh, who drops hints that he was involved with the film-to-tape transfer.   Nichols goes into the details of the show quite well for someone who didn't always understand the techniques he was using, such as the impressive front projection that put fliers, and entire airplanes into the aerial scenes.   Best of all, Nichols has very interesting things to say about all of the cast, including an intimidating Orson Welles, and some deep and selfcritical thoughts about the film as a whole.  A lot of the frustration of watching this movie comes from not understanding what the heck whole scenes are about, and this specific commentary addresses these concerns shot-by shot.  Nichols comes off as a very intelligent and reflective director with no illusions about this grandiosely bizarre chapter in his distinctive career.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
Catch-22 rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Trailer, Commentary with Mike Nichols and Steven Soderbergh
Packaging: Snapper case
Reviewed: May 23, 2001