War Is Heller

Rating: 6/10 (11 August 2016)

If we pause to consider it was, logistics to one side, relatively easy to adapt Gone With The Wind for the screen, as it was To Kill A Mockingbird, once you had Rhett Butler and Atticus Finch squared away it was just manual labor. But would YOU like to be the one that shot a movie version of The Catcher In The Rye? No, I didn't think so. Same thing with Catch-22; sometimes a best-selling, even 'cult' novel just SEEMS elusive but isn't really but sometimes it IS, and Catch-22 is one of those times. Buck Henry and Mike Nichols certainly gave it the old college try and probably made as good a fist of it as anyone could but in the end it was like nailing jelly to the wall. The thing about the novel is that you can open it virtually anywhere and you'll eventually get back to the beginning, it's a kind of Finnegan's Wake-lite without the contrived words i.e. in conventional English. The movie has made a half-decent stab at the same thing but a crucial mistake was eliminating some characters and cutting and pasting with events. Nevertheless worth a look.