The Catch-22 of Translating a Hit Novel to the Screen

At the end of the Sixties the book that everyone was reading was Joseph Heller’s darkly satiric World War II novel, Catch-22.  And the movie that everyone was watching was The Graduate, the outrageous romantic comedy directed by Mike Nichols. So there was little surprise, when word spread that Nichols would be directing a screen version of Catch-22, that audiences couldn’t wait to see the results.

 Nichols’ film, released in June 1970, unfortunately pleased almost no one. This despite the fact that it was a serious effort to translate a complex, almost hallucinatory, novel to the screen.  The Writers Guild of America did nominate Buck Henry’s script as the best screen drama adapted from another medium, but it didn’t win. That same year, M*A*S*H, a much more popular depiction of the truism that “war is hell,” took home a WGA Award for comic adaptation. Perhaps it was the success of M*A*S*H, featuring a lively rendering by Robert Altman of a behind-the-lines Korean War story, that undercut Catch-22’s box-office chances. Or  perhaps the brilliant, bitter Catch-22 just couldn’t work without Heller’s sparklingly ironic prose.

 Still, it was a worthy attempt. Nichols, who’d shown such visual flair in The Graduate, had fun depicting the almost operatic lift-off of WWII era bomber jets. Having used the songs of Simon and Garfunkel to great effect in The Graduate, he mostly avoided music in the far more serious Catch-22, but at one key point tried an outlandish reference to the opening strains of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” familiar to anyone who’d seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. (And, in that era, who hadn’t?)  

 The large cast is a remarkable gathering of Hollywood talents. Nichols was known for his casting savvy, and we can fully believe Martin Balsam as a gruffly maniacal Col. Cathcart, Richard Benjamin as a smarmy Major Danby, Anthony Perkins as a vulnerable Chaplain Tappman, Bob Newhart as an anxious Major Major, and Orson Welles as a bloated General Dreedle. The leading role, Yosarian, is that of a neurotic cipher, and Alan Arkin is particularly good at conveying his anxiety about war, the U.S. Army, and life in general.

 Given the worldwide success of The Graduate, it’s not surprising that Nichols again turned to several performers from that 1967 film. Elizabeth Wilson (Benjamin’s anxious mom in The Graduate) has a tiny but memorable role as the mother of a dying soldier. Norman Fell (the cranky landlord of Ben’s Berkeley rooming house) is seen here as a blunt sergeant. Buck Henry, who had brilliantly adapted Charles Webb’s The Graduate for the screen while also playing a skeptical desk clerk, again performs double duty, donning  a creepy little mustache to portray Balsam’s toadying sidekick, Colonel Korn.

 Nichols also cast Art Garfunkel, a novice actor and one-half of the musical duo whose songs dominate the score of The Graduate, as the naïve young Nately. (The following year “Arthur” Garfunkel was a central figure in Nichols’ corrosive Carnal Knowledge.) Charles Grodin, who to the end of his life insisted that he’d been cast by Nichols as Benjamin Braddock but had turned the role down, plays the oblivious bombardier on Yosarian’s plane. But what of the screen’s actual Benjamin Braddock? I’ve learned that Dustin Hoffman, whose Hollywood career burst into life with The Graduate, badly wanted to play the shifty Milo in Catch-22. Perhaps Nichols was truly offended that Hoffman took on, immediately following The Graduate, the scruffy role of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. In any case Nichols gave the role of Milo not to Hoffman but to his Midnight Cowboy co-star, Jon Voigt.

 

 

A Flight to the Finish: The Late Charles Grodin in Midnight Run

I come from a family of accountants. In my experience, CPAs tend to be hard-working straight shooters who put in long hours on the job and wouldn’t dream of getting wild and crazy. That’s one of the reasons I got a kick out of Midnight Run, the 1988 film that was a career highlight for the late Charles Grodin. This action dramedy, also starring Robert De Niro in one of his earliest comedic roles, tells an intricately plotted tale of an ex-cop-turned-bounty-hunter hired to apprehend an accountant who has filched a mobster-client’s ill-gotten gains and donated them to charity. In order to get paid by a hot-tempered bail bondsman, De Niro’s Jack Walsh must transport nebbishy Jonathan Mardukas (Grodin) from New York to L.A. On the trail of the two men are some mobsters, a rival bounty-hunter, and the FBI, led by the towering, glowering Yaphet Kotto. All of whom want Mardukas for their own purposes.

 De Niro, of course, is adept at playing a tough guy with a soft center. At first the movie is all his, as he exercises his considerable skills at lock-picking as well as tracking down missing accountants. Once he finds Mardukas in NYC and plunks him onto an L.A.-bound 747, we’re slightly  disappointed that his quarry seems no more than a buttoned-down prig with a fear of flying. But in this film bland looks can be deceiving. As the two men travel together in trains, cars, and buses, we begin to suspect that Mardukas—so quick to trot out his financial opinions and persnickety health advice—is more complicated than he seems. That’s when Grodin’s apparently milquetoast character blossoms into someone with his own unexpected talent for larceny and much else. And it’s not giving much away to say that by the end of the film he and De Niro’s Jack have reached a meeting of the minds that is totally satisfactory.

 Charles Grodin’s long screen career began in the late 1950s with a lot of episodic television. He was a finalist in the search for the right young actor to play Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, and always clung to the story that he’d been offered the role but then, for some reason or other, turned it down. (When I was writing Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, the film’s producer, Larry Turman, insisted to me that – despite Grodin’s outstanding reading in a casting session – he was never chosen for the role.) Personally, I suspect Grodin would not have been the right choice to play Benjamin, who behaves very badly in the course of the film but still must have the audience in his corner. As Mike Nichols himself has noted, there’s a sweetness about Dustin Hoffman’s screen persona that makes people root for him, no matter what. Grodin, though, is more off-putting, even when he’s hilarious to watch. His own breakthrough role was in 1972’s The Heartbreak Kid, directed by Mike Nichols’ one-time artistic partner, Elaine May. Like Benjamin, the film’s Lenny Cantrow (Grodin) behaves outrageously once he’s fallen in love. But instead of succumbing to the charms of  someone innocent and pristine like Elaine Robinson, Lenny falls hard for a beautiful, worldly-wise WASP (Cybill Shepherd) while he’s on his honeymoon with a nice young woman from his own community (played by May’s actual daughter, Jeannie Berlin). Yes, it’s funny, but he’s VERY hard to like.

 Grodin’s whole career has been based on playing characters who are ambiguous in their appeal. One critic complimented the “inspired spinelessness” of his film roles, even in family movies like the Beethoven series. He’ll be sorely missed.