Kurt Vonnegut is among the most popular and clear-eyed
writers with a taste for the experimental, but his work is notoriously
difficult to adapt because his tone and humor are so individual and his
plotting so unhinged. Consequently, few filmmakers have had the guts to tackle
his source material, and even fewer have done so successfully. Most people will
agree that George Roy Hill came closest with his 1972 version of what is
probably Vonnegut’s signature work.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks)
becomes “unstuck in time,” as he bounces from childhood trauma to his horrifying
experiences as a prisoner of war during the bombing of Dresden in WWII to his sometimes
troubled family and political life after the war. His pinball thoughts also
take him to Tralfamadore—an alien otherworld in which he lives out his fantasies
of solitude with his beloved dog and the Hollywood starlet (Valerie Perrine) of
his dreams.
Initially, Hill and screenwriter Stephen Geller threaten to
cheat their way through Vonnegut’s bizarro world by having Pilgrim type actual
text from the novel for the camera, but this conceit is quickly abandoned and
the filmmakers allow Dede Allen’s ingenious editing and excellent performances
from the low-key Sacks, uproarious Ron Liebman as a fellow American soldier who
seems to want Pilgrim dead more than the Nazis do, Eugene Roche as a loving
father figure in the internment camp, and Sharon Gans as Pilgrim’s attentive
wife to carry the story. Glenn Gould’s haunting and elegant performances of
classical keyboard pieces draw the pathos out from under the film’s ample absurdity
and horror beautifully.
Arrow Films’ new blu-ray edition of Slaughterhouse-Five also tunes into the film’s beauty with a visual presentation
that is clean, richly colored, and warm and a strong mono audio track. Bonus
features include a feature commentary from film historian Troy Howarth; comparatively
confident on-screen analyses from Kim Newman and Daniel Schweiger, who focuses
on Gould’s music; an interview with Perry King (Pilgrim’s ne’er-do-well son in
the film); and another interview with Robert Crawford, who documented the
original film’s production.
