Heller on Earth

Rating: 10/10 (4 March 2006)

Mike Nicholl's (1970) film of Joseph Heller's book 'Catch 22' - published 9 years earlier - is set in a US bomber unit during the latter part of the Second World War in Italy. Heller himself served in Corsica as a bombardier on B-25 Mitchell bombers, the aircraft which feature in the film. He flew 60 missions. Buck Henry, who plays Lieutenant Colonel Korn in the film, wrote the screenplay.
We find our hero, bombardier Captain John Yosarian (Alan Arkin), as entrenched and battle-crazed as the other confused and confusing members of this unusual army air force unit.
In conversation with Colonel Cathcart (Martin Balsam) and Lt. Col Korn (Buck Henry) as the film opens, the substance of his conversation is lost beneath the roar of aircraft taking off nearby. As he walks away from the conversation, he is murdered by a civilian who is apparently gardening, near to the base of the bombed out operations tower.
The course of the film takes us on the nightmarish journey leading up to this apparently motiveless crime.
It has to be understood that where human beings of any age or nationality are forced to remain in circumstances that are sufficiently challenging and unremittingly life-threatening, they evolve a series of unique and often incomprehensible strategies to protect what's left of their own sanity.
As the film develops, we begin to get a feel for how each individual in the unit fights their own personal battle to preserve their sanity in this intractible situation.
Among these people, Yosarian seems to be rather special. Not the sharpest tool in the box, yet he alone seems to keep some fragile sense of what is intrinsically absurd in his surroundings and what is simply the product of the confusion in the minds of the other members of his unit. Or maybe we just get sucked into Yosarian's own particular madness and see all the others from his own beguiling perspective.
Along the way, we get to know the company Doctor (Jack Gilford) who is the first to try and explain 'Catch 22' which turns out to be the meaningless apparent solution to a conundrum that seems to underpin everything the army thinks or does. It's as meaningless as the old rhyme
'Mother may I go out to swim ?' 'Yes, my darling daughter.. Hang your clothes on a hickory limb But don't go near the water !'
Doc Daneeka hates flying, so flies on paper as an absent passenger. But when the plane he is logged as flying in crashes, even the suggestible Sgt Towser (Norman Fell) is so switched off and tuned out that he can no longer believe the evidence of his own senses. He is no longer sure what he is permitted to acknowledge as real and happening.
Major Danby (Richard Benjamin), leads the flight briefings apparently under the impression that he is fronting in a TV commercial for soap-powder aimed at suburban housewives. While mess-officer Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight) manages to avoid combat duty by bartering most of the operational equipment for contraband, returning later having cut a deal to bomb their own base.
This film is a tremendous portrait of ordinary people in really extraordinary circumstances. By the time we see Yosarian endearingly using the army's twisted logic to gently seduce an Italian girl who has become more accustomed to bartering intimacy for cigarettes and stockings, we realise that we too have somehow finally cracked.