No Jokes, No Mind

When I came to see Mike Nichols’s film version of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the lines on both sides of the Sutton Theater were already long. There are, apparently, a large number of New Yorkers willing to spend $3.50 for a brief dose of humanistic piety. War is not only hell, as General Sherman supposedly said, it is also perfectly attuned to the “good guys, bad guys” psychology so characteristic of our America. Aimed at the young in heart and mind, Catch-22 can be absorbed into the general style of the times: “revolutionary” zilch.

Nichols and screenwriter-actor Buck Henry took the job of translating the novel to the screen seriously. Given the limitations of what they had to work with, they have done a creditable job. Unlike most novelists whose work is used by screenwriters, Heller cannot complain that he has been artistically bludgeoned. If anything, the film is structurally tighter than the novel. Nichols has eliminated Heller...