Movies - Slaughterhouse-Five

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	Movies - Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five is a film adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel of the same name. The 1972 drama was written by Stephen Geller and directed by George Roy Hill. It stars Michael Sacks (in his first film), Ron Leibman, and Valerie Perrine, and features Eugene Roche, Sharon Gans, Holly Near, and Perry King.

Vonnegut wrote about the film soon after its release, in his preface to Between Time and Timbuktu
: :I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen. I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book.

The film won the Prix du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, as well as a Hugo Award. Both Hill and Geller were nominated for awards by their respective guilds.

Sacks plays Billy Pilgrim, the film's protagonist. The film is a faithful (and successful) condensation of Vonnegut's novel, presented through Pilgrim's eyes. Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time" and experiences the events of his life in a seemingly-random order (an altering of a story's chronology that pre-dates by over twenty years the use of that technique in Pulp Fiction
). The events take place throughout his life, with particular emphasis on his experiences during World War II alongside fellow prisoners of war Edgar Derby (played by Roche) and the psychopathic Paul Lazzaro (played by Leibman). His life as a husband to Valencia (played by Gans), and father to Barbara and Robert (played, respectively, by Near and King) are also depicted, as they live and sometimes even enjoy their life of affluence in Ilium, New York. A "sink-or-swim" scene with Pilgrim's father is also featured.

Most unusual are the scenes of Pilgrim's extraterrestrial life on Tralfamadore, with Hollywood starlet and fellow abductee Montana Wildhack (played by Perrine). Yet it is the bombing of Dresden in World War II which serves as the critical event motivating the themes of the film as a whole.

Differences from the novel

In addition to the inevitable condensation, there are a number of differences between the novel and the film, including the following:

The opening scene, in which the camera often focuses on a letter Pilgrim is typing to the editor of the local newspaper, is not from the novel.

The repeated "insects in amber" analogies are missing.
Pilgrim's abduction scene is different and longer in the novel. Details missing include the war film he watches backwards (due again to being unstuck in time), and the appearance of the flying saucer, said to be 100 feet in diameter, with purple light pulsating around the saucer's portholes along the rim.
Derby's execution in the film happens immediately after he innocently takes a small porcelain figurine from among the ruins of Dresden. In the novel, he is put on trial first, and is executed for taking a teapot. The scene that sets up the significance of the figurine, where Derby mentions such a figurine in a letter to his wife, is also unique to the film.
Two characters in the novel, Kilgore Trout and Vonnegut himself, are missing from the film.

Music

Slaughterhouse-Five is the first of two feature films for which Glenn Gould supplied the music. In this case it is in the form of needle drops from his Bach catalog, including Goldberg Variations Variation 18 (Canone alla sesta), and a performance recorded just for the film of the third ("Presto") movement from Brandenburg Concerto #4 in G major.

Trivia

John Dehner
has a scene as an arrogant professor writing about Dresden (and uninterested in hearing Pilgrim's first-hand experiences.
The scenes set in Dresden were filmed in Prague.

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