Cinema: Some are More Yossarian than Others

(10 of 10)
try to make it just an antiwar movie or an insane comedy. He caught its essence. He understood."

And All Ours

Apparently it is not all he understood. "You can't increase the size of your na ture," Nichols says. "But you can be true to it." Gazing at the rear-view mirror, he confesses that a second look at Virginia Woolf "bored me. I hate the way it's photographed." The Graduate? "My eyes pass it as I look. It's like a blank place in my head."

As for the stage work back in the Broadway days, the harshest judgments come from a friend, Buck Henry, and an enemy, Scenarist William Goldman. Says Henry: "Mike is one of the most famous directors in the U.S., but he hasn't made one significant contribution to the theater. I think it's a fanatical waste of time, but he's crazy not to do Pinter. He should have done Joe Orton's farces. But Mike doesn't want to do any thing badly. He takes a risk, but he takes a risk on things he knows he can do better than anyone else."

In his carping book The Season, Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sun dance Kid) devoted a whole chapter to Nichols sardonically entitled "Culture Hero." Wrote Goldman: "Nichols' work is frivolous — charming, light and titanically inconsequential . . . What Nichols is is brilliant. Brilliant and trivial and self-serving and frigid. And all ours."

Let's Begin

Until Catch-22, Nichols' demur would have been as hollow as his hits. Abruptly, he has supplied his own defense. The film, he claims, perhaps too extravagantly, has "helped me discover how I want to live—I'm going to get rid of myself in stages." In any case the film has apparently made him demand more of himself professionally. Says Nichols, "It's come clear that you have to make your own statement. I'm well aware of the separation between what you say and do. But it has to be begun, so all I'm really saying is, 'Let's begin.' "

The speech has the ring of a World War II bombardier who has chosen a difficult—and perhaps impossible—way home. Will anyone call the way trivial and self-serving and frigid? If so, the only reply can be: "The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."