The 1972 movie adaptation (by Stephen Geller) of Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is remarkably faithful to the book. The time travel aspect is quite clear. The experience of being a clueless (,helmetless, rifleless, bootless) GI lost behind German lines during the Battle of the Bulge is vivid and pretty much all there. The unheroic optometrist's postwar life is vivid and somewhat expanded upon by the movie. The horrified wonderment of the ruins of Dresden after British and American incendiary bombing is there, enhanced by the reaction of one of the children guarding the American POWs.

Some of the irony and all the metafictional reflections are gone, but the movie adds a musical score credited to Glenn Gould that is all-Bach. (The main theme is the 20th of the Goldberg Variations; there's also a snippet of a Brandenbur Concerto and a piano concertothe b; the DVD cuts off the ending credits before the music is specified, leaving the opening one to Gould as the only visible musical credit.)

The protagonist (no longer the narrator), Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) was an optometry student when he was drafted and assigned to be a chaplain's assistant (that's why he has no rifle). He never saw the chaplain he was supposed to insist. Instead he was found by three American GIs: two scouts and a psychopathic preener named Roland Weary (Kevin Conway). Weary is attempting to strangle Billy when a Nazi patrol finds them. They take Weary's boots, and his feet are mangled on the march through snow and mud. Weary blames Billy and another psychopathic bully, Paul Lazzaro (Rob Leibman) vows revenge when Billy gets back to America.

Back in America, Billy marries the daughter of the head of the Illium School of Optometry, the overweight Valencia (Sharon Gans), whom he treats well. Billy sires a surly son, Robert (Perry King), and a daughter, Barbara (Holly Near), who is Valencia's pal. The humdrum suburban life and the traumatic memories of being lost and found behind German lines is cushioned by alien abduction. The Tralfamadoreans (invisible to humans in the movie) teach Billy that everything that ever was always is, and he hurtles through space-time, mating with a Playboy center-spread and movie starlet, Montana Wildhawk (Valerie Perrine) on Tralfamador, where the two of them (and Billy's dog Spot) live in a glass dome zoo cell.

The jumping around is something film does easily, though the jump-cutting with overlapping sound herein is particularly skilled. Having just read the book, I had no questions about what was being illustrated. Those with less immediate familiarity with the book might find the jumping around more difficult, though the early ones are user-friendly (matching shots across the time transitions) and should get viewers used to the three time frames (each of which proceeds chronologically in the film, unlike in the book).

I've already lauded the addition of Bach music. Putting faces and bodies into this or any other novel's characters closes down imagining what they looked like. I felt that this helped in realizing Valencia, the very young German guards, and the father-figures Edgar Derby (Eugene Roche) and Lionel Merble (Sorrell Brooke). The casting undercut the contrast between Billy and Lazzaro, however. The book's Billy Pilgrim is a 6'3" beanpole and Lazzaro an unsleek chihuahua. Michael Sacks and Rob Leibman are more standard-sized.

Within the book, Vonnegut wrote this auto-critique: "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." The movie has more characterization and more dramatic confrontations. In both media Billy is affectless, endlessly repeating "So it goes." If the movie Billy said this, I missed it, but with his view of the future as already set and nothing, including the end of the world, being changeable, he is initiativeless. His grateful wife, Valencia has a lot of affect and also gets a much enhanced car "chase" rushing to her husband's hospital bed. Ludicrous is more entertaining when it is flamboyant (Valencia, Lazzaro) then when it is flat (Billy, Barbara).

Minneapolis-native George Roy Hill directed "Slaughterhouse-Five" between his immensely successful buddy pictures, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting" (which he followed up with the hilarious "Slap Shot"). That Valencia is more interesting than Billy might seem inconsonant with Hill's specialty, but he also directed some very female-centered movies, including "Thoroughly Modern Millie," "The World of Henry Orient," and "Period of Adjustment,"  and "The Little Drummer Girl," the last of these having some heavier subject matter than his other movies... and subject matter that is of considerable relevance to the present day.

(BTW Prague filled-in for the pre-incineration Dresden. My review of the book discusses the intentional incineration of civilians and the reduction since 1969 in estimates of the total casualties from the 130,000 in the novel and movie to 25-30,000... which is still 20+ times as many as were killed in Coventry in two Nazi firebombings.)

The DVD offers subtitles in English, French, or Spanish, and an anemic trailer, nothing more. Still, it is good that at least this surprisingly neglected 1972 move is available on DVD with fairly good image (Miroslav Ondrícek's [Amadeus, Ragtime] complexly realized cinematography) and sound (Gould's Bach plus sounds from the scenes) reproduction.



© 2006, Stephen O. Murray



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD