Catch-22

Catch-22 (1970) is an anti-war satire you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Mike Nichols from Joseph Heller's novel, with Alan Arkin, Orson Welles, Jon Voight, Martin Sheen and Art Garfunkel in the cast. USA, 122 minutes.

World War II, somewhere over the Mediterranean. Bombardier Yossarian has reached a simple conclusion: the only sane response to a war is to get out of it. He wants a medical certificate declaring him insane — which would ground him permanently. The problem is the rule called Catch-22: anyone who asks to be grounded on grounds of insanity thereby proves he is sane. The loop is airtight. Yossarian runs every angle he can find, each time colliding with the same institutional wall, while his fellow airmen keep dying around him in ways that are both farcical and genuinely terrible.

Nichols holds the comedy and the horror right next to each other without letting either cancel the other out — which is exactly Heller's trick. Arkin plays Yossarian's mounting desperation with a precision that keeps the character from becoming a joke even when everything around him is one. If you are interested in how war films can work without a single heroic frame, this is a sharp place to start. Stream Catch-22 (1970) online on iFILM.