10 Unfilmable Properties That Should've Stayed That Way

5. Catch-22

One of the greatest satirical anti-war novels of all time, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has gone down in history not least on account of its title, which has long since entered into modern parlance as a term for any paradoxical situation which arises from contradictory rules. Adapted to the screen by Mike Nichols in 1970, mediocre at best is perhaps the best way to sum up the movie version - Nichols is a competent director but he seems to have been overwhelmed by the complex ins and outs of the source material, unable to find an anchor to ground the film. Consequently uneven and disjointed, it was overshadowed at the time of its release by a far more successful war-themed black comedy, Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. A minor cult movie today, the adaptation of Catch-22 is yet another movie which resides in the realms of the "noble failure", worth seeing if you're a fan of the novel as a curiosity piece and little more.