Catch-22, set on an American airbase on an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy in World War II, is regularly listed amongst the greatest novels of the twentieth century which everyone should read (I first read it about thirty years, pretty much straight though in a single day). The "catch" of the titles refers to the fact that to be withdrawn from combat duty pilots and aircrew have to be diagnosed insane, but them asking to be so is taken as indicating their sanity.
As with the earlier film adaptation in the 1970s, I'm not sure that Catch-22 really translates to either the big or small screen. It's not just that the structure of the novel, with many of the early chapters focusing on the foibles and interior life of an individual character, has to be altered to fit a more linear narrative on TV, but the zaniness, transmitted in its five hundred or so pages by Heller's prose, in descriptive passages as well as dialogue, can't really be rendered either.
When you don't laugh at an adaption of a novel which almost defines "black humour", that's a problem.
I saw the film twice; once before I'd read the book and once after. It made no sense to me until I'd read the book.
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