Slaughterhouse Five

In the counter-cultural '60s two best-selling anti-war novels were Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' and Kurt Vonnegut Jr's 'Slaughterhouse Five; Or The Children's Crusade' which was based on Vonnegut's own experiences as a captured POW during WWII and his survival of the Allied firebombing of the city of Dresden that killed some 135,000 civilians.. Both were filmed (Catch-22 by Mike Nichols in 1970) and both disappointed. 

The screen adaptation by Stephen Gellar stays quite close to the source book but that is a problem for Hill as the latter is dramatically piecemeal and its relatively limited charms are conceptual rather than cinematic, Director Goerge Roy Hill was riding high with Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969) and would go on to make the mega-successful The Sting (1973) but here he founders with what is a literal illustration of Vonnegut's ironically-toned text...

Diligently editing together the three main strands of Billy Pilgrim's life, the film replays the substance of the novel with none of its sensibility, having the main character flip back and forth in time but without any empathy for the effects on its protagonist. In the lead Michael Sacks in his first film (and pretty much his last, at least as a lead actor) may well literally embody the mildness of Vonnegut's timid hero but filmically he is terminally bland and his aging over some three decades with respect to both body language and make-up is less than convincingly handled. His load is not lightened by too many performances that are two-dimensional, particularly Ron Leibman's sociopathic GI. Paul Lazarro, and Valerie Perrine's twittering soft-core porn star, Montana Wildhack, in what is an ambitious but underwhelming project that, reflecting the temper of the times, won the 1972 Cannes Jury Prize.. 

 

Want something different?