Cinema: Some are More Yossarian than Others

(9 of 10)
three Mexican cities on party lines."

Nichols decided that Stacy Keach, cast as Cathcart, was "too young and light for the part." The actor was spirited away at dawn. Keach, who distrusted the parochial atmosphere, now identifies Nichols with the psychotically ambitious Cathcart. "Psychologically," he says, "I saw him in that position. In fact, I think he should have played the role."

Taking My Life Tonight

Orson Welles arrived and began his lecture series: to Nichols on direction, to Film Editor Sam O'Steen on cutting, to actors on acting. But he consistently blew his lines and ended by being led through his readings by Nichols. When a B-25 roared over the compound and 18,000 sticks of dynamite ripped into buildings, huts and shacks, an actor forgot his lines. It was at times like this that Nichols would whisper to Buck Henry not quite facetiously: "You carry on; I'm taking my life tonight." The costs kept rising. The end result totaled some $15 million—much of it invisible onscreen. It will have to gross $37.5 million before it turns a profit.

Even beyond Mexico, there remained a residue of despair. After four months of shooting in Guaymas, two months in Rome and a month in Los Angeles. Nichols confessed that he was "pregnant with a dead child." In everything he had previously accomplished, there had been an accretion of finicky brush strokes that became a character or a landscape. With Catch-22, there was a stripping away. He pared easy gags from the script. He erased nearly 300 extras because the picture "was beginning to look like Twelve O'clock High." Sylbert was instructed to strip the sets bare; a whorehouse became a room, a bed a radiator. On the set, characters were dropped. In the cutting room, during eight months of editing, speeches were shaved. There was no musical score.

One afternoon, after three months in the dark, cluttered editing room, Nichols called to Galley: "Hey! I want you to come and look. I think I love it."

In its finished form, the movie contains several stylistic allusions to other film makers. Catch-22's degenerate Roman tour is frankly Fellini. The airborne scenes have obvious overtones of Kubrick—indeed, Nichols bowed to his film-making friend by repeating a brief and thunderous musical theme from 2001. Catch's galvanic jumps in time owe much to Richard Lester. Still, the film has the force of a source—the kind of work that other film makers will soon be quoting.

To a degree, the film's premonitory quality is a result of externals. Says Henry: "Heller was writing about a man who finally decided to opt out and who, in the end, ends up in Sweden. That was a total absurdity when he wrote it in 1961, a really far-out kind of insanity. Well, it's come true."

Not literally — the fictional fugitive of 1944 had paid his dues; it is too fac ile to see him merely as a Viet Nam drop out 25 years before his time. Galley regards the film as an extension of the 7 o'clock news: "Unfortunately," he says, "it seems that you can al ways count on the country to do things to keep a picture like this timely." Heller himself says, "When I saw the film I expected to be disappointed — after all, I had no part of it. But I saw what Mike had done. He didn't