ARTS Black comedy and black ice
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Once upon a time, Hollywood acquired a Prince Charming. Anything he touched turned to box-office; he made a small pic- ture, The Graduate, which by beating most of the big pictures of the year at their own game stimulated a whole Hollywood shift away from gross expenditure. Easy Rider only finished what The Graduate started. But Hollywood, which didn't yet realise that it was moving into the era of the small film, had sent its Prince off to Mexico to shoot a very big, very expensive movie.
Catch-22 (Paramount, 'X') cost some fifteen million dollars—rumour suggests, and elisions in the script seem to confirm, that a good deal of this went into shooting scenes which in the final, slimmed-down, two-hour version never got near the screen. Present Hollywood economics require Catch-22 to earn about $37,500,000 before it begins to make money; and anyone who thinks it is automatically going to do this is, in the scripts favourite word, 'crazy'. The irony, the catch, the paradox which anyone in- volved in the enterprise might appreciate, is that after the glib and winning ways of The Graduate, Mike Nichols now emerges as a film-maker. It is rather as though Prince Charming had mortgaged the palace to settle down in luxury with one of the Ugly Sisters.
Catch-22 is in many ways a gravely flawed film: its tone too easily sidles into porten- tousness, as though it were almost afraid of the triviality of being funny; it is too much of a series of sketches to develop momen- tum; it lacks the cold, inborn certainty of a Dr Strangelove or the flibbertigibbet spon- taneity of a M*A*S*H. But whatever is at fault in the film seems to come honestly from inside itself, not to be imposed by some hopeful, weakening spirit of compromise. Amid the hippy-grimacing anti-war films, Catch-22 is bleak and unenticing and, in its deeper undercurrents, significantly un- modish. Joseph Heller said of his novel that
wrote it during the Korean War and aimed it for the one after that.' But any screen temptation to dress these second world war Americans in Italy in Vietnam war clothing has been honourably resisted.
M*A*S*H, which borrows something of Heller's original tone, is anarchic comedy about survival; Catch-22, in this version, is mortally wounded comedy about dying. Bombardier Yossarian, whose craziness becomes the only sane reaction to a totally mad war, is haunted throughout the film by a memory of one particular death—that of the gunner, Snowden, so newly attached to the unit that no one even knows his name. Nichols and his very lucid scriptwriter. Buck Henry,e keep spiralling the film around to the Point in time when Yossarian kneels hope- lessly over the dying man: a giant flash-
back enclosing all kinds of mental paren- theses.
The airfield, from which bombers take off eerily and shudderingly into mist, is revealed at a closer look to be littered with the bro- ken debris of dead aircraft. Yossarian impersonates a dying man for his visiting American family—the doctor reasoning that one dying man looks exactly like another, and that it would be a shame to disappoint relatives who had come so far; and in the film's most surrealist scene, a laughing airman on a beach-raft is cut literally in half by a lazy, low-flying plane—and the pilot, in a kind of agonised slow-motion, drives his plane and himself head on into a moun- tainside. The distance from which the film sees most of this—Yossarian's perspec- tive—freezes black comedy into black ice.
Alan Arkin's Yossarian is one of those rare symbiotic performances in which there's a moment when actor and character fuse: Yossarian's despairing sympathies emerge through what Arkin puts into his eyes. Around him, the all-star grotesques of the air force station are a more hit-or-miss assort- ment. The most successful (and no doubt also the easier) performances ornament the most befuddled characters: Anthony Perkins as the Chaplain, Art Garfunkel as Nately, very young and innocent and doomed, whose mind only runs into shadow when the ancient and corrupt Italian reminds him that even America isn't immortal, and Richard Benjamin as silly Major Danby, cooing like an air-hostess as he briefs his pilots. Orson Welles as Dreedle, the general who wants to shoot everyone, and Martin Balsam as the terrible Colonel Cathcart, forever pushing his pilots back into the air to get better aerial photographs of better bomb- ings, can't evade old top-brass caricature. And Jon Voight's Milo Minderbinder, the ultimate wheeler-dealer who sees capitalism as a continuation of war by other means, is the victim of a sequence in which Nichols turns him visibly, stridently Fascist. Irreproachable morality, no doubt; but weak-kneed film-making.
Catch-22 makes bad mistakes of this kind, partly perhaps in trying to live up to a rather over-grand concept of itself. The sequence in which Yossarian wanders through a dim Fellini night-town is rampant over- statement. But almost everything around the airfield is so strikingly shot, by David Watkin, that it becomes its own dream landscape, a visual extension of Heller's ex- istentialist chop-logic of closed circles and inescapable paradoxes. At the end, when Yossarian sets off on a raft for Sweden in the wake of Orr, the eternal survivor, you don't expect him to make it: the release, as in other fantasy escapes, is simply in realising that there could be (even if there isn't) somewhere else. It's a difficult moment of ex- hilaration, but Nichols doesn't duck it or cheat on it, and that perhaps, in the end. is the quality of Catch-22: it didn't duck.
Tony Scott's Loving Memory last week inaugurated both the long-awaited second auditorium at the National Film Theatre and a potential move by the British Film Institute Production Board (if it secures the money it needs) towards more feature pro- duction. Scott's film, running about fifty minutes, is an anecdote about a brother and sister, living in somewhat fuddled isolation in the Yorkshire dales, who run over a young cyclist and carry the corpse back home with them. The woman (Rosamund Greenwood) makes it her confidant, audience for her memories of the dim dead days surviving in her photograph albums and old gramophone records. Beautifully shot by Chris Menges in back and white, with an effect of hazy sunlight, Loving Memory is directed with hard-working but rather soft sensitivity. The odd idea doesn't really impose itself enough, and you feel that a plainer and less literary way could have been found for releasing the quietly obsessed monologue which is the film's centre. Scott has obvious promise: but here the pleasing small accuracies don't make up for an affectation in the film's con- ception. Perhaps he prefers dead time to dead bodies. The corpse, at least, is intel- lectualised to a point where it doesn't make difficulties for him: it's left to the audience to wonder about rigor mortis and other em- barrassments.
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