Catch-22

Time has been kind to Mike Nichols’ film of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Upon its release, it was of course a notorious flop, the first in Nichols’ previously spotless portfolio. Every director gets too big for his or her britches after a few successes and gambles everything on a lame horse. Except that Catch-22, decades away from all the expectation and buzz attached to this prestigious event film, ends up looking better than a lot of modern movies that win Oscars and make zillions.

The emboldened Nichols, with exactly two character studies under his belt, was crazy enough to think he could take command of a huge production based on a generally acknowledged masterpiece of satire, with elaborate flight sequences that would’ve stymied a seasoned war-flick director, and a cast full of veterans and tyros with wildly different styles. The hubris Michael Cimino drew upon to make Heaven’s Gate has nothing on the balls — or stupidity — required of Nichols to show up on the Mexico set of Catch-22 every day for six months. He was in way over his head, just like Yossarian (Alan Arkin), the WWII bombardier obsessed with finding a way to get out of flying more missions. Catch-22 ends up being a gigantic metaphor for the self-crucifixion every director endures while making such a folly as this.

But what a strange and mesmerizing folly. I’ve loved and hated Catch-22 over the years, but its eventual appearance on DVD, with its epic widescreen scope finally restored (along with a grisly revelation cropped entirely out of the previous VHS image), was the deciding factor for me. This is an eerily beautiful movie, though its color scheme never strays far from military browns and grays. Those are real B-52 Mitchell bombers taking off (in a notoriously lengthy, and expensive, scene), and their sheer mass and power are almost oppressively formidable. (Today, it’d all be done with CGI and you’d get no sense whatsoever of the hefty death-dealing monstrosity of these planes.) The production feels authentic, particularly the nightlife of Pianosa, which owes more than a little to Fellini.

Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry (who also appears as the disdainful Colonel Korn, forever chomping on a cigarette holder á la Hunter S. Thompson) shuffle the deck of Heller’s absurdist characters, discarding quite a few but holding onto some. It was truly the era of the All-Star Cast, and Catch-22 has one for the ages: Orson Welles, flattening everyone with a raised eyebrow of contempt; Martin Balsam and Anthony Perkins, together again ten years after Psycho; an impossibly young and histrionic Martin Sheen; nervous Bob Newhart and Richard Benjamin; the recessive fuzzy-head twins Art Garfunkel and Bob Balaban (who don’t even pretend to act like 1940s servicemen); casually slimy Charles Grodin (“I only raped her once,” says his Aarfy after chucking a woman out a window); and, perhaps most impressively, Jon Voight as the stunningly opportunistic Milo Minderbinder, who evolves — or devolves — from a chattering huckster to a cold-eyed lord of industry:

Milo: [He] died a wealthy man, Yossarian. He had over sixty shares in the syndicate.
Yossarian: What difference does that make? He’s dead.
Milo: Then his family will get it.
Yossarian: He didn’t have time to have a family.
Milo: Then his parents will get it.
Yossarian: They don’t need it, they’re rich.
Milo: Then they’ll understand.

The novel wasn’t so much Heller’s broadside against war or even the military as his piss-take at bureaucracy and corporate culture. Heller, who served in WWII as a bombardier and in an ad agency as a copywriter, filtered his war experience through the Peter Principle. So in Catch-22, the war, we’re told, is being fought to move product and make stockholders happy. And this is the good war, the one fought by the Greatest Generation, the one generally agreed to be necessary — Heller scoffs at all that, and the movie does too. Nichols and Henry make Yossarian unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five; the structure feels anecdotal and even arbitrary, studded with surreal nightmares and flashbacks. A recurring motif has Yossarian prompted to help the grievously wounded gunner Snowden, each flashback bringing us a little closer to the truth.

“Cold,” Snowden keeps repeating, and the film goes cold as well. Odd, startling events like the fate of Hungry Joe and the bombing of the airbase ordered by Milo himself remind us that this is very much a 1970 film, with casual gore and nudity and profanity and a fleeting glimpse of a blowjob. Slapstick — Bob Newhart’s fake mustache, Richard Benjamin collapsing to the floor after Orson Welles orders him taken out and shot — consorts uneasily with fire and blood and perversity. Glenn Erickson of DVD Savant referred to Catch-22 as “a creepy horror film,” and I know what he means; there is an eerie quietude to such scenes as the Snowden flashbacks and a bit with Bob Balaban obliquely revealing his master plan while repairing a mini-stove.

Why does the movie begin at the end? Why does the sound of engines smother the dialogue in the first scene? Audiences must’ve been baffled by Catch-22, and it’s an awkward sandwich to get one’s mouth around: soggy here, sharp there. But it has a bizarre power that can’t be overlooked. It’s Nichols’ Apocalypse Now, saying more about a young director who bit off more than he could chew than about anything else, filtered through dismay not at the corporate ethos but at the Hollywood ethos. Nichols turned the movie into a bomb he dropped right on its own studio, tossing aside every single trope of war movies and every other genre. It’s a massive oddity, a radical satirical farce that could only have been financed by a major corporation. And for all its flaws, it’s still one of the best things Mike Nichols ever did.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Here it is, finally, on DVD: the movie so many of us had been waiting to see since we first heard Roger Ebert had co-written it. What had the most famous film critic in history done when given license to weave his own fantasies on the big screen? Something pretty fucking weird, that’s what. And certainly not without entertainment value.

An in-name-only non-sequel to the so-bad-it’s-good melodrama Valley of the Dolls, Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls plays as if Meyer and Ebert took all the clichés of the earlier film, cranked them up to 11, and morphed it into a satire of what 20th Century-Fox might’ve done if it were consciously chasing the hippie audience. And those kinds of films abounded in the late ’60s, when every studio wanted its own Easy Rider. Such films as End of the Road and Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, all but forgotten today except by die-hard cult-flick fanatics, were the agonizing result. BVD is best seen in that context — as a hip young film critic’s bemused take on Valley of the Dolls rewritten as a funkadelic freakout.

The movie follows three female rockers — Kelly McNamara (Dolly Read), Casey Anderson (Cynthia Myers), and Petronella Danforth (Marcia McBroom) — who catch the eye of fey impresario Ronnie ‘Z-Man’ Barzell (John LaZar), who renames them the Carrie Nations. Their star rises fast, bringing with it the usual problems of excess. The overheated plot is the film’s least worthy attribute, having been cobbled up more or less on the spot anyway; Ebert has remarked that the narrative got itself so tangled that it had to be resolved with a climactic murderous rampage and a triple wedding.

Seen today, BVD is most notable for its sheer heedless energy and its bottomless thirst for winking camp. Ebert was 27 at the time, Meyer twenty years his senior, yet it feels like the work of a much younger director. The hyperactive editing scheme leaves the film’s contemporaries in the dust, but since the compositions are always rock-steady, we’re always well-oriented in the action (scattershot Avid junkies like Michael Bay would do well to learn from this). Lavishly hued, and surprisingly low on nudity (there’s some, but it’s always matter-of-fact), BVD earns the comparison one IMDb reviewer drew to Disney cartoons. It’s had an undeniable influence, too; retrospectively, I detect a little of it in Boogie Nights, a lot of it in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I had fun mentally casting the modern remake: Cillian Murphy would make a fine Z-Man; Lindsay Lohan would be a perfect new Kelly. But really there’s nothing wrong with the cast here, all of whom understand what kind of film they’re in and stay over the top with aplomb (particularly John LaZar’s teasingly perverse Z-Man, clearly the film’s highlight). The general mood is antic, a party atmosphere, until things turn rabidly bloody at the end and we get a laughably stentorian narrator sealing the film with the moral we’re supposed to take away.

Sure it’s ridiculous; sure it’s bizarre. But I can’t call it a bad film, since all its eccentricities (including the groovy dialogue) were obviously lovingly placed there. The film is its own defense — it doesn’t need Ebert or anyone else to go to bat for it. It aims to be a colorful slice of eye-boggling, seamily plotted entertainment laughing at its very status as a major studio film, and on that level it more than succeeds.