Cinema: Some are More Yossarian than Others

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face. He begs Doc Daneeka (Jack Gilford) to ground him as being insane with fear. But the flight surgeon dutifully recites the Air Force manual's imaginary Catch No. 22: Naturally, anyone who wants to get out of combat isn't really crazy. So supernaturally, anyone who says he is too crazy to keep flying is too sane to stop. On such circular reasoning rests the plot, the dialogue, and indeed the film's essence.

Repulsive and Instructive

The dominant image is the circle. Catch-22 is as cyclic as the Soldier in White, a mummy-like form completely encased in bandages. At one end, a bottle feeds fluid into the region of some upper vein. At the other, a pipe conducts the fluid out of the kidney region and into another bottle. At a given signal, preoccupied nurses exchange the bottles, and the cycle begins anew.

Fully loaded, the bombers take flight, make their lethal gyres and return empty. Under Nichols' direction, the camera makes air as palpable as blood. In one long-lensed indelible shot, the sluggish bodies of the B-25s rise impossibly close to one another, great vulnerable chunks of aluminum shaking as they fight for altitude. Could the war truly have been fought in those preposterous crates? It could; it was. And the unused faces of the flyers, Orr, Nately, Aardvark, could they ever have been so young? They were: they are. Catch-22's insights penetrate the elliptical dialogue to show that wars are too often a children's crusade, fought by boys not old enough to vote or, sometimes, to think.

Yossarian's mind circles five times to that instant in which McWatt calls out, "Help him!" Each time Yossarian's arc of memory lengthens as he bends to aid the mortally wounded Snowden —until at last he sees the man's flesh torn away and his insides pour out. It is at once the film's most repulsive and instructive moment. From that time Yossarian cannot accept the escape bargain his superiors finally offer him: "All you have to do is like us." He cannot betray his fellow victims of what Norman Mailer called "exquisite totalitarianism." It is then that the rabbit must run or perish.

Most of the film has the quality of dislocation. It is lit like a Wyeth painting and informed with the lunatic logic of Magritte. Only twice does it grow didactic. In an Italian whorehouse, 19-year-old Nately (Art Garfunkel) confronts a 107-year-old pimp. The scene is photographed narrative, almost word-for-word from the book's symbolic and simplistic confrontation: weary but supposedly immortal Italy v. vigorous but naive and supposedly doomed America. When the boy accuses the ancient of shameless opportunism, the centenarian defends himself with the ultimate weapon: age. "I'll be 20 in January," answers Nately. There is no answer to the old man's Parthian shot: "If you live."

As the film progresses, Lieut. Minderbinder descends from mess-hall hustler to full-time racketeer. In a crude and overdrawn caricature, the loutish blond fly-boy suddenly becomes a Hitlerian symbol who bombs American bases in a deal with the Germans and sells stocks in the war because it is good business. Here Nichols—like Heller—cannot let hell enough alone, and Engine Charlie's oft-quoted G.M. dictum is paraphrased "What's good enough for M-M Enterprises is good for the