Film Chronicle: The Importance of Not Being Orson

The past year has been the happy witness to contributions from most of the surviving heavyweight film-makers. Antonioni, Bergman, Chabrol, Fellini, Fuller, Godard, Hitchcock, Minnelli, Truffaut, Visconti . . . even Renoir has returned, with a disappointing trio of trifles called Le Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir. And now—Mike Nichols! Although Catch-22 is only Nichols’ third film, his first two (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate) were so immensely popular and so highly praised that most critics have responded to his current film with the jeers and jubilation usually reserved for radically important works, be they masterpiece or catastrophe. So it’s a little surprising to discover that Catch-22 is a film of almost equally divided merits and debits, unsuccessful but quite interesting.

Nichols’ problem is that he’s been everything he could possibly want to be, except for one thing: Orson Welles. And he’s done everything except make the Citizen Kane of the Sixties and Seventies. On the surface, the film sense and talents of the two men are similar. Welles came to film from radio and the stage; Nichols came from radio, comedy records, cabaret and the stage. Welles’ films were full of long-held, deep-focus shots that allowed his fine actors to develop a character and a scene without the fear of being cut to pieces in the editing room; Nichols does the same. But in his greatest films (Kane, 1941, and Falstaff, 1966), Welles created much more than an acting style and an arresting visual technique. He created— and sustained—a complex, universal world of his own.

RC

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Richard Corliss

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The past year has been the happy witness to contributions from most of the surviving heavyweight film-makers. Antonioni, Bergman, Chabrol, Fellini, Fuller, Godard, Hitchcock, Minnelli, Truffaut, Visconti . . . even Renoir has returned, with a disappointing trio of trifles called Le Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir. And now—Mike Nichols! Although Catch-22 is only Nichols’ third film, his first two (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate) were so immensely popular and so highly praised that most critics have responded to his current film with the jeers and jubilation usually reserved for radically important works, be they masterpiece or catastrophe. So it’s a little surprising to discover that Catch-22 is a film of almost equally divided merits and debits, unsuccessful but quite interesting.

Nichols’ problem is that he’s been everything he could possibly want to be, except for one thing: Orson Welles. And he’s done everything except make the Citizen Kane of the Sixties and Seventies. On the surface, the film sense and talents of the two men are similar. Welles came to film from radio and the stage; Nichols came from radio, comedy records, cabaret and the stage. Welles’ films were full of long-held, deep-focus shots that allowed his fine actors to develop a character and a scene without the fear of being cut to pieces in the editing room; Nichols does the same. But in his greatest films (Kane, 1941, and Falstaff, 1966), Welles created much more than an acting style and an arresting visual technique. He created— and sustained—a complex, universal world of his own.