We remember plenty of movies that got chalked up as failures, yet now seem more interesting than most new Oscar nominees. Mike Nichols’ ambitious anti-war epic, from Joseph Heller’s satrical novel, impresses greatly in multiple ways, with a dream cast in quirky, imaginative roles. Alan Arkin’s Yossarian is an airman, a sad sack everyman. He wants to survive his combat posting, but the Army Air Corps seems determined that he become a battle statistic. Paramount’s new 4K encoding is a beauty, and the extras include an all-time favorite commentary track, an audio discussion between Mike Nichols and Steven Soderbergh.

Catch-22
4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray
Shout Select
1970 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 123 min. / Street Date October 28, 2025 / Available from Diabolic DVD / 31.99
Starring: Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford, Buck Henry, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Orson Welles, Bob Balaban, Susanne Benton, Norman Fell, Charles Grodin, Austin Pendleton, Peter Bonerz, Jon Korkes, John Brent, Collin Wilcox Paxton, Philip Roth, Felice Orlandi, Marcel Dalio, Elizabeth Wilson, Gina Rovere, Seth Allen.
Cinematography: David Watkin
Production Designer: Richard Sylbert
Art Director: Harold Michelson
Costume Design: Ernest Adler
Film Editor: Sam O’Steen
Visual Effects: Albert Whitlock, Robin Browne
Screenplay Written by Buck Henry from the novel by Joseph Heller
Produced by John Calley, Martin Ransohoff
Directed by Mike Nichols

Director Mike Nichols spent 1969 directing a dream project in Mexico, with an all-star ensemble cast of big names eager to be associated with the genius who made  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and  The Graduate. The glorious ‘director’s decade’ was getting underway, and an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s wicked satire about World War II seemed the greatest movie anybody could make.

Produced as an expensive epic, Nichols’ Catch-22 is a fascinating black comedy that can’t quite translate the odd vibe of fatalism in Joseph Heller’s acclaimed novel. The superb cast does fine work with the original’s many inspired dialogues. A dry airstrip with real airplanes becomes a comedy stage for Heller’s cast of airmen, with absurd names like Duckett, Korn, Dreedle, Moodus and Daneeka. The laughs are technically accomplished and beautifully performed … but Heller’s droll despair sags toward a kind of hipster cynicism.

Sporadically funny, the show is actually more successful as a horror tale. We sympathize with Alan Arkin’s everyman bombardier, a poor sap caught in a war-bureaucracy nightmare, but we’re too shell-shocked to invest in him. Screenwriter Buck Henry pre-empts our emotional commitment with shock gore effects. The unpleasantries repelled mainstream audiences, that fled back to the relative security of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. Altman’s gross-out gore was less upsetting, and its brand of frat boy humor less challenging.

The author was indeed a B-25 bombardier on the Italian front, and flew 60 missions, but he never claimed that his novel was realistic. An A.A.C. base has been established on the island of Pianosa: afraid of losing his life on missions over Italy, unrepentant slacker Yossarian (Alan Arkin) desperately tries to get exempted from combat duty. Insane men can’t fly, but no matter how crazy he behaves, nobody pays him any heed. His superiors keep raising the number of missions one must fly. Yossarian’s fellow airmen passively accept these discouraging orders. Indeed, the insanity of the war only seems to feed their personal aberrations.

The wildest is mess officer Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight), a wheeler-dealer who bribes the C.O. Colonel Cathcart (Martin Balsam) into letting him establish a corporation.  Minderbinder soon has the entire air wing working for his personal profit. The other airmen accept Milo’s crimes without comment. Yossarian remains psychologically isolated with his personal Catch-22 nightmare: Crazy men can be relieved of duty. But wanting to get out of combat shows that you know the war is crazy. Therefore you must be sane, which means that you must keep fighting.

Catch-22 is nobody’s favorite film, but it’s still an impressive show — funny, bizarre, and remote at the same time. Its all-star casting was a major deal in 1970, with ambitious actors jumping at Heller’s scores of weird characters. From  Psycho came Martin Balsam as the infinitely corrupt C.O. Colonel Cathcart, and Anthony Perkins as the woefully ineffective chaplain, so desperately trying not to offend anybody. Orson Welles’ General Dreedle is one of the few conventionally ‘spoofy’ characters, but Welles does honor the spirit of the ensemble. Bob Newhart had already contributed a comic ‘stand up’ performance to a  combat picture; his painfully intimidated Major Major suffers for being lost in the military bureaucracy.

Special guest performances come from Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin, who had been married since 1961. Benjamin had finally made a mark theatrically in  Diary of a Mad Housewife; his emcee-like control tower speeches as director Major Danby hit the perfect note. A star from ten years before, Ms. Prentiss’s great talents were never fully tapped. Her flighty Nurse Duckett is lusted after by various airmen, and has one dedicated scene with the talented Elizabeth Wilson, of The Graduate. They tend a burn victim completely covered in a cast, performing a sick gag with bottles of saline and urine.

Mike Nichols would continue his Graduate partnership with comic and writer Buck Henry on  The Day of the Dolphin. Henry gives himself some good dialogue as Colonel Korn, Cathcart’s right-hand crony. The two of them work up a nasty sardonic disdain for the airmen under their command.

Nichols clearly had his pick of acting talent. Fresh from  Midnight Cowboy came the newly minted star John Voight, a perfect choice for the soulless glad-hander Milo Minderbinder. From the same film came Bob Balaban to play the insane pilot Orr, who keeps surviving crashes and coming back for more abuse. The equally talented Martin Sheen had distinguished himself in  The Incident and  The Subject Was Roses. As the pilot Dobbs, he fits his personality into the ensemble. Three years later, Sheen achieved a starring hit in Terrence Malick’s  Badlands.

Singer Art Garfunkle won a chance to join Nichols’ crazy crew, as a fairly sensible pilot, Nateley. That celeb casting does the film no harm, and Garfunkle returned for a more demanding role in Nichols’  Carnal Knowledge. After almost a decade, he came back to play a similarly conflicted male in Nicolas Roeg’s strange and extreme  Bad Timing.

Catch-22 was our first exposure to the distinctive personalities of Austin Pendelton (Moodus, General Dreedle’s nepotistic assistant), Peter Bonerz (the somewhat short-changed character McWatt), and Charles Grodin (obnoxious navigator Arfy Aardvark). All made their mark in features and TV. The one actor really cheated is Seth Allen, whose Hungry Joe is reduced to little more than a special effect.

Detractors may have a point when they describe the show as a shifting series of black comedy standup routines. The dialogue is brilliant but cryptic; there’s always the sense that we are going to be victimized for trying to care about what happens to these reluctant bomber pilots.  It’s as if the clown comedians in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World entertained us by killing each other, or dying in gory car crashes.

Despite the encyclopedic cast, Nichols and Buck Henry never let Catch-22 crumble into a series of cameos. Nor do they lose focus on Alan Arkin’s strong portrayal. Yossarian’s anxiety and fuss never becomes tiresome. He tries everything, including sitting naked in a tree at the squadron’s reception for General Dreedle. Yossarian is the Everyman character that the show needs. Every time his missions approach the number to rotate him away from combat flying, Cathcart and Korn raise the quota. Franz Kafka goes to war!

Alan Arkin was always a lovable actor, but Nichols and writer/actor Buck Henry give us little hope that things are going to work out for Yossarian. In this nightmare war, part Twelve O’Clock High and part Dante’s Inferno, we need someone like Yossarian to latch onto. As the jokes get sicker they begin to resemble tortures. Cathcart and Korn expend lives to make their performance records look good. General Dreedle is obsessed with ‘bombing patterns’ that look good in aerial recon photos.

The film’s second classic audio exchange is an existential failure of communication over an airplane intercom, delivered like a comic misunderstanding:

With the plane interior presented as a dream-like limbo, the exchange is absurd-disturbing, especially when the dream recurs as a running gag. It pays off with some appallingly graphic gore. Black Comedy becomes sadistic Grand Guignol. Audiences felt anxious — why are we being punished like this?  We begin to fear that things will only get worse. Even Paula Prentiss’ full-frontal dream sequence has a disturbing quality. The violence eventually spills over, when Yossarian discovers that one of his colleagues has committed a horrible crime.

The story would seem to suggest that war encourages more senseless acts of violence. The most traumatizing scene plays out on a featureless beach that resembles a painting by Salvador Dalí. It’s straight from the book: a character named Hungry Joe meets a grotesquely awful end, while standing on a swimming raft.  ^*

The movie is mounted on a giant scale, with at least a dozen B-25 airplanes flying all at once. Tallmantz aviation assembled a small air force on an airstrip in the town of San Carlos, Mexico, very near the port of Guaymas. As explained in his audio commentary, Mike Nichols used this air force as background color for dialogue scenes. Nichols and cameraman David Watkin tried to achieve whole scenes in single unbroken takes, like the ooh-ahh dazzlers that Orson Welles had pulled off for  Touch of Evil. Long, complex shots truck with characters while multiple aircraft taxi in the background. A big mission takeoff scene ends with a telephoto shot taken from hundreds of yards away. In the foreshortened perspective, the planes look like kites hovering in the hot air.

One trucking shot with Martin Balsam and Jon Voight along the side of a runway concludes with the gag of a plane crashing. A master shot up front begins with a pan across planes taxiing and taking off, to Yossarian with Cathcart and Korn in the headquarters building. Planes circle in the distance while they talk. The view follows Yossarian’s exit until an assailant comes at him with a knife. The unbroken scene is almost three minutes in duration. Not much work there for the negative cutter.

The director’s ideas for master shots required the airplanes to idle in place for long periods of time, propellers spinning. The fliers complained that the abuse was burning up the air-cooled engines. Nichols admits that he all he cared about was getting the shot he wanted. This is the film where helicopter cameraman John Jordan, who had already sacrificed a foot shooting You Only Live Twice, lost his life in yet another aerial filming accident.

Milo Minderbinder’s profiteering turns both the airfield and the local town into a horror show of vice and corruption. By the time he’s riding around with an armed entourage, like Mussolini, the movie’s overall point begins to blur. We understand that big scams preyed on official army procurement, but the connections aren’t there to argue that the insane economy of WW2 founded a new kind of American corporate tyranny. We instead see a realistic story populated by characters as exaggerated as those in a comic book.

Catch-22 is not overtly pretentious, but it also doesn’t rally the audience behind its premise. We like Yossarian but feel that he’s already doomed. Audiences unfamiliar with the book wouldn’t understand this horror take on a standard service comedy, like Richard Quine’s amusing Operation Mad Ball. The year before, Sydney Pollack directed the very stylized, quasi-fantastic war movie  Castle Keep. It also wants to make a weird, ironic statement about war, but it functions first as a conventional combat action tale. Undemanding viewers likely endured the ‘deep’ artsy scenes, to get to the more satisfying battle action at the finale.

Joseph Heller purists complained that important book characters had been dropped to cut the story down to size. That’s hardly the point now — Catch-22’s grandiose scale and impressive talent roster are what make the film so interesting. Movies like this are no longer made — any actor big enough to star in a movie doesn’t want to risk being buried in an ensemble cast. Mike Nichols would move away from the experimentation of his first four pictures, but never again tried a show as sprawling or technically complex as this one. All those special performers and all those amazing pre- CGI images … we can’t resist.

In today’s regulated industry, it’s exhilarating to think that once upon a time, filmmakers were entrusted with millions to make so many commercially risky movies.

Shout Select’s 4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray of Catch-22 was released 6 months ago, so I’m grateful to correspondent Chas Speed for letting me know it existed. The old DVD was a favorite to re-view and re-think: what parts of the show work and what parts don’t?  Did the filmmakers make any bad choices along the way?  Watching with that idea in mind, one stops being so critical. There’s a lot of fine talent here, doing clever / funny things.

The remaster looks flawless to me. By 1969 Panavision had engineered a large assortment of telephoto anamorphic lenses, with good zooms as well. David Watkin gives the show some great visuals. His camerawork captures the feel of the bright sunlight, and lights a nighttime an air raid with the illumination of special effect explosions.

The 4K carries a 5.1 mix in addition to the original mono. Subtitles spell out the dialogue in the opening scene, audio we were never meant to hear theatrically. The second Blu-ray disc has the feature as well; after seeing the 4K, we quickly note that it isn’t as bright or as punchy.

We haven’t seen a Shout! release in a while. I like the way they label their discs — I don’t have to search for tiny logos to tell which disc is the 4K and which is the Blu-ray.

The disc carries two commentaries. The new track is by Drew McWeeny. It’s a good complement to a track with Mike Nichols and director Steven Soderbergh from the old 2001 DVD. McWeeney tags the show as ‘ambitious, messy and remarkable.’  He almost disappoints us with the information that Mike Nichols thought he was failing even during filming, that he was letting his cast down. Near the end he says that Nichols knew his film would flop several months before it opened, when he attended a preview of M*A*S*H. 56 years later, Catch-22 should be better recognized for its merit.

We don’t mind not having a long list of extras, because the release brings back the excellent audio commentary with Mike Nichols and director Steven Soderbergh, who was clearly a big fan of Nichols. Soderbergh’s prompts and prods bring out all kinds of interesting facts about the shoot.

Nichols explains that, this early in his career, he didn’t understand all of the filming techniques he was using. Impressive front projection put fliers and entire airplanes into the aerial scenes. Nichols has much of interest to say about his cast, including the intimidating Orson Welles. He offers some candid self-critical thoughts, coming off as an intelligent and reflective director with no illusions about this chapter in his distinctive career.

In conclusion, a tangent. Joseph Heller downplayed the danger in his own war experience flying over Italy. Is Catch-22 even a little realistic about this long-distance bombing warfare?   One resource is the 1947 documentary  Thunderbolt, directed by William Wyler and John Sturges. It was held up for two years before being distributed by Monogram. In the last year of the war, a fighter-bomber squadron based in Corsica raids the Italian mainland. The enemy offers little aerial opposition, so their ‘milk runs’ concentrate on the systematic destruction of the rail system, and anything that looks like war materiel. Planes are lost now and then. We expect the airmen to be efficient hunter-killers, and they obviously are not bombing civilian areas. But on the way home, with unused ammunition, the planes shoot at anything that catches their eye, including ordinary Italians. Wyler and Sturges express the airmen’s disconnect to the killing: “they’re nobody I know.”  Thunderbolt screens on TCM occasionally, in an unrestored print.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Catch-22
4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent but not to everyone’s taste
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Audio Commentaries:
With Film Critic Drew McWeeny (2026)
With director Mike Nichols and Steven Soderbergh (2001)
+ Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: April 11, 2026
(7499catc)

^*  The fate of Hungry Joe was a memorably traumatic experience, not being prepared for such a grotesque depiction of violent death. We saw it first-run at Westwood’s new National theater. 

(Spoiler)  When we saw the movie again weeks later in general release, the Hungry Joe gore effect was different. In the original run, I remember seeing an extra shot after Joe is cut in two. The cut image was a medium shot of the legs just standing there for a moment, with a fountain of blood spraying upward. Then the legs folded up and the image cut to the long shot, as on this DVD. I don’t think my memory is wrong. The trimmed version appears to have become the ‘official’ cut for Catch-22.

Visit CineSavant’s Main Column Page
Glenn Erickson answers most reader mail: cinesavant@gmail.com

Text © Copyright 2026 Glenn Erickson