In 1953 Joseph Heller was working as a copywriter in a small Manhattan based ad firm. With ambitions leading him towards the world of literary accomplishment and the potential freedoms of being a well-off, and self-employed, novelist, he started writing a book that would evolve over the course of the next eight years into Catch-22. Because he'd already published a few short stories in such publications as Esquire and The Atlantic he began seeking a literary agent for the nascent work in 1955. After meeting with almost total indifference from the literary community, he was able to make a friend of a then agent's assistant named Candido Donadio who was later co-founder of the Donadio & Olsen literary agency.

Working on the project over the next few years, Heller continued building his relationship with Donadio while she established herself as an up-and-comer in agenting circles. With his own career handing off to Time magazine where he wound up writing ad-sales presentations by day, he filled his nights with making progress on the novel.

When Heller and Donadio eventually approached Simon & Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb with several hundred completed pages from the book in 1957, he proved enthusiastic about the project even though it was far from being finished. Agreeing to frequent exchanges to polish pages and hone Heller's efforts, Gottlieb willingly assisted the author in reworking the material over the next three years until it was finally ready for publication.

With slim expectations and nearly 500 pages of dense writing and a catchphrase in the title phrase "catch-22", the novel was released to the reading public. In short order it became one of 1961's bestsellers with legions of fans that required multiple re-printings to keep up with demand.

For reasons long since speculated about its narrative about a bombardier named Yossarian, who struggles to keep his sanity in the closing days of World War II, was unusually resonant with readers, literary critics and cultural commentators alike. Reviewers wrote warmly about Heller's style, social perspective and about the book's classic qualities. Readers began quietly celebrating Yossarian as a counter-cultural figure and Simon & Schuster, the book's publishers, were quick to recognize their goldmine.

One reason for that novel's success was that its many characters were seemingly drawn from historical composites, as well as from enough hyperbolized observation to fill several books, but its force came from its darkly comic story about circumstances constantly at cross purposes with the condition of characters occupying them. Thus Yossarian's demand to be let out of bomb runs on the grounds he's crazy are seen as proof of his sanity because only a crazy person would want to fly bombing runs even if, as catch-22 states, a crazy person wouldn't be allowed to fly bomb runs in the first place.

Hollywood took note of Heller's success and bought the rights to his debut novel that was eventually written by actor/writer Buck Henry. With a monstrous budget, an important new director in Mike Nichols and a cast filled with many young talents easily recognized in the years since the film's release in 1970, Alan Arkin perhaps least of all as Yossarian, the movie showed up in theaters and played against Best Picture winner Patton with disappointing box office results and a critical drubbing.

In taking Heller's epic and sprawling story that was written in flashback and flash forward fashion with months of action, multiple European city settings, various psychological and historical character explanations, uncountable authorial interruptions of the text and a rare-for-the-times criticism of the military, Catch-22's filmmakers cut out an adaptation for themselves marked by hubris and excess. With a two-hour release print, lots of money and the reduction of Heller's many set pieces to just a bare few sequences, Nichols's movie is a disappointment save for its showcase of acting talent in 1970.

Besides Arkin in the starring role, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford, screenwriter Buck Henry, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Orson Welles, Bob Balaban and Charles Grodin all have significant supporting parts. Paul Simon was also cast for the film although his part was written out and it should also be remembered that George C. Scott turned down Balsam's part of Colonel Cathcart because he was convinced he'd already played the role in Dr. Strangelove.

The collective optimism of these actors fully realizing their underwritten parts through the glow of winning performances is but a small echo of the film's overall problem. By short shrifting Heller's source material with only a fractional adaptation of its length the movie rides its literary pedigree into the ground without successfully adjusting the novel's literary sensibility to the cinema. Plus it's heavy-handed condemnations of the military circumstances that may have seemed revolutionary in 1961 were far less striking in 1970.

Still, any evaluation of Nichols's movie must attempt to look at it based on its own merits rather than as the adaptation of one of the twentieth century's great American novels. In so doing one realizes how much his film relies on spectacle on the level of form and content to deliver its moments of punch like the opening sequence of a bomb raid leaving Yossarian's air base.

With a widescreen, Panavision aspect ratio the bomb runs are thrills of sight and sound just as the eventual revision of Rome as purgatory is a showcase of social disgrace and utter corruption. Aside from these remarkable moments where the largess of the movies is used to its strongest effect, Catch-22 is an oversize, unwieldy beast of a film. That it's also an anti-Vietnam protest film in the realization of Yossarian's struggle against the military system where he's trapped makes it oddly urgent and closely connected to the liberal-leaning moment of 1970.

Because I've seen the movie projected on film in a theater and also on videotape it should be noted that there is a remarkable difference in the two experiences. In the former the movie's overwhelming qualities, mostly those of its explosions, airplane engines and layered sound design, make it a mildly unpleasant sensate experience and provocative parody of late '60s American concerns about government, the military and individual freedom. On videotape, however, these sensual qualities are totally lost through pan and scan sequencing and the dullness of its big screen stars shining like TV sitcom actors wrestling with material that's not quite brilliant enough to challenge them, or else too silly to be taken seriously.

Neither of these reactions is desirable but, like Heller's source novel, Catch-22 has inspired a legion of fans that return to it again and again. As one of these fans and despite my misgivings I'll close by writing that it's a film with as many rewards as punishments, as many star sightings as missed opportunities and as much energy spent delivering on big ideas as in deflating its commentary with slapstick routines and silly jokes.