Image: Vintage military aircraft in flight. Photo by I Bautista via Pexels.
A war film that refuses to behave like one
Catch-22, directed by Mike Nichols and released in 1970, is based on Joseph Heller’s great anti-war novel, and it remains one of the strangest major studio films ever made about the Second World War. It is set on a fictional Mediterranean island, Pianosa, where an American bomber squadron flies missions that never seem to end. The men are not fighting a clearly defined enemy so much as they are fighting a system: a set of rules, quotas, and promotions that keeps raising the number of missions they must fly before they can go home. In the middle of that absurd machinery stands Yossarian, played by Alan Arkin, a bombardier who decides that the only sane response to an insane war is to refuse to fly.
Martin Sheen plays Dobbs, one of Yossarian’s fellow officers. Dobbs is not the centre of the story, but he is essential to its atmosphere. He is a young, earnest, slightly desperate flyer who wants to believe that the system can be beaten if only someone is brave enough to act. In Heller’s novel and in Nichols’s film, Dobbs proposes a plan to kill Colonel Cathcart, the commanding officer who keeps raising the mission quota. The plan is discussed, debated, and endlessly postponed, not because the men lack anger but because the logic of the squadron — its hierarchies, its rivalries, its fear — makes collective action almost impossible. Sheen plays Dobbs with a nervous idealism that makes the character both sympathetic and a little frightening. He is not a villain. He is a man who has convinced himself that one violent act will restore sanity, and the film lets the audience feel how easily that conviction can curdle.
Dobbs in a company of eccentrics
One of the pleasures of Catch-22 is its ensemble. Around Yossarian are Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer who turns the war into a business empire; Major Major Major, promoted because of his name; Doc Daneeka, who explains the famous catch; and a gallery of officers, chaplains, and nurses who each cope with the war in a different, doomed way. Nichols fills the screen with these characters, often in wide, sun-bleached compositions that make Pianosa look beautiful and unreal at the same time. The beauty is part of the point. War, in this film, is not only mud and blood. It is also boredom, bureaucracy, and a Mediterranean light that makes everything look like a holiday photograph while men are dying on missions.
Within that ensemble, Sheen’s Dobbs stands out because he is comparatively straightforward. He does not have Milo’s comic cunning or Major Major’s surreal luck. He has a grievance and a plan, and he keeps returning to Yossarian to ask for help. Sheen gives those scenes a pleading, restless energy. Dobbs paces, lowers his voice, and tries to make murder sound like common sense. Yossarian listens, hesitates, and ultimately cannot commit, and the audience understands both men. Dobbs is right that Cathcart is exploiting them. Yossarian is right that killing Cathcart will not change the system that produced him. That deadlock is Heller’s novel in miniature, and Sheen and Arkin play it without turning it into a lecture.
Sheen before he was a star
When Catch-22 was made, Martin Sheen was still early in his film career. He had worked on stage and in television, and he had the lean, intense presence that would later make him famous, but he was not yet the leading man of Badlands or Apocalypse Now. Watching him in Catch-22 is therefore instructive. He is already doing what he would do for the next fifty years: listening closely, reacting honestly, and letting a character’s inner conflict show in small physical choices rather than big speeches. Dobbs’s hands, his glances toward the door, his sudden smiles when he thinks Yossarian might agree — these details make a supporting role feel complete.
Nichols’s direction also suits Sheen. Nichols, who had come from comedy and theatre, understood timing and ensemble rhythm. He lets scenes run long enough for absurdity to become uncomfortable, and he trusts his actors to find the humour in despair without winking at the camera. Sheen fits that approach. He does not play Dobbs for laughs, even when the situation is darkly funny. He plays him as a man who believes he is being reasonable, and that seriousness makes the comedy sharper. When Dobbs’s plan collapses into inaction, the joke is not on Dobbs alone. It is on every institution that promises a rational solution to an irrational war.
The catch, stated and lived
The title’s catch is famously circular: a flyer can be grounded if he is insane, but asking to be grounded proves he is sane, because only a sane man would want to avoid flying. Doc Daneeka explains it with bureaucratic calm, and the film returns to it again and again, not as a punchline but as a trap. Dobbs’s story is one version of that trap. He wants to escape the missions, so he proposes to kill the man who orders them. But to carry out the plan he needs Yossarian, and Yossarian cannot bring himself to kill a superior officer in cold blood, even for a cause he sympathizes with. The system, in other words, does not need to be defended. It defends itself by making decent people unable to act together.
That theme would recur throughout Sheen’s career, from soldiers in Vietnam to workers on Wall Street. He would often play men caught between loyalty and conscience, and Catch-22 is an early, clear example. Dobbs is not yet Willard, the captain sent to assassinate a fellow officer in Apocalypse Now, but the two roles rhyme. In both films, a man is asked to solve a moral problem with a gun, and in both, the supposed solution creates a new moral problem. Sheen understood that rhyme early, and he plays Dobbs as if he already senses it, even if Dobbs himself does not.
Why Dobbs still matters
Catch-22 was not a commercial triumph on its release, and it has always divided audiences. Some viewers find its episodic structure and its refusal to provide a conventional war story frustrating. Others consider it one of the most faithful adaptations of an “unfilmable” novel ever attempted. Time has been kind to it, in part because its target — a war machine that measures success in sorties flown and promotions earned — has not gone away. The film’s humour is still bitter, its images are still striking, and its ensemble still feels like a company of real, flawed people rather than a collection of types.
Dobbs matters within that achievement because he gives the film a human scale. The novel’s ideas are large, but Sheen keeps them grounded in a single young officer who is tired, angry, and looking for someone to share the burden of a terrible decision. When he leaves a scene, the audience is left with Yossarian’s silence, and that silence is the film’s argument: in an absurd war, even the desire to do the right thing can be paralysed by the very rules that make the war absurd.
Watch Catch-22 for its audacity first, and then watch Sheen. Notice how little he needs to do to make Dobbs memorable. He does not steal scenes. He inhabits them, asks his question, waits for an answer that never quite comes, and moves on. It is the work of an actor who already knew that the most powerful thing on screen is often not a speech, but a man listening — and realizing, too late, that listening is not the same as acting.