Brilliant Satire Of WWII Insanity With Amazing Scenes And Incredible Performances

Rating: 7/10 (4 October 2014)

Yossarian is a US Army bombardier serving in Mediterranean Italy during World War II. Despairing of the horrors, lunatic bureaucracy and general insanity all around, he resolves to get grounded by claiming to be crazy. But there's a catch; to be grounded you must be diagnosed as crazy, but if you ask to be grounded then quite clearly you're sane ...
Much like Naked Lunch, this is a good movie of a good book which is fairly unfilmable. Joseph Heller's 1961 novel is an amazing achievement - arguably the first novel to deal with war as both horror and comedy, using an episodic stream of consciousness approach which enhances both sides of the material to great effect. The movie, made at the height of the US-Vietnam war, has something of a hippy sensibility, but is very successful in its surrealism and satire. It's almost impossible to imagine it being made nowadays; scenes like the one where Yossarian pretends to be the son of a visiting family when the real son has inconveniently died shortly before are too daring and avant garde for a modern studio picture. The movie piles on craziness after craziness without ever seeming heavy-handed, but for every funny moment there are carefully crafted shocks, culminating in Yossarian's post-curfew walk through a city where crime and depravity have become so common that no-one hardly notices anymore. The film's trump card is a stunning cast of great actors in early stages of their careers; Voight, Garfunkel (billed here as Arthur), Sheen, Grodin and Balaban are all terrific, Newhart is very funny as the harassed Major Major, and Welles steals his scenes as the world-weary General Dreedle. The best two performances for me though are from Arkin and Perkins, perhaps the two most interesting American actors of their generation, who seem to make almost every nuance and gesture somehow add to the characterisation and impact of each scene. Nervous comedy is probably about the hardest thing to play, and this is a masterclass from both. Nicely shot in the Sonora desert by David Watkin, with an amazing main set built by Richard Sylbert. Written by Buck Henry (who plays the cigar-chewing Lieutenant-Colonel Korn), who also collaborated with Nichols on their previous movie, The Graduate. It's worth noting the influence of the seminal 1923 Czechoslovakian novel The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, on both the movie and Heller's book. Not everything in the film works as well as it could; the absence of a score for me is a problem, the situations are so extreme that they require patience and an open mind, and as with all non-structured writing it does sometimes slip into an episodic feel, rather than a flowing story. It's an amazing statement on what war is really all about though, made by a big studio (Paramount) during a short interval when Hollywood had the courage to back filmmakers and artists to try something imaginative and different. If you've only vaguely heard the term Military Industrial Complex and can't see why there are always so many nasty little wars going on all around our world, this is a good movie to try and catch for some answers.