Word: dresden
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Slaughterhouse-Five. An improvement on the Vonnegut novel, directed by George Roy Hill and written by Stephen Geller (who wrote the original novel on which Pretty Poison was based). The structure is cleaned up, the characters sharpened, and the Dresden holocaust sequences are horrifying--if not as devastating as, say, the recent films of the Quang Tri citadel...
...VONNEGUT actually makes clear is that technology has brought us to the point where you can say nothing analytically sensible about massacre. With a lot of no-crap Yankee charm, he also attacks all who would defend the Dresden bombing, from academic historians who age into monsters to breakass generals and Allied patriots. But Billy learns on Traifamadore only that life has good moments and bad ones, and war is a bad moment that should not be concentrated long...
...Slaughterhouse itself: Edgar Derby, Billy's best friend, substitute father figure and moral fellow; and PaulLazarro, the evil of the world summed up in a pipsqueak from South Philly, a monomaniacal revenger who finally kills Pilgrim for no good reason. Derby is executed for "stealing" a figurine from the Dresden rubble in order to replace an identical one broken by his son, While Lazarro survives the war rat-like, chewing off his own guts and using the bile he collects against mankind in general...
MICHAEL SACKS is a perfect Pilgrim--an ordinary Joe, likeable to the core, without an ounce of bellicosity in him, wanting to fill a need for people in more ways than being an optometrist. He has an unsynched walk and awry grin before Dresden, but ages believably into a self-controlled human shell who finds outlet for his bank of sympathy by raising a dog named Spot. He is ably supported by Eugene Roche's Derby, a solid man who's based his life on Christian principle (though not aware of its shaky national foundation), moving with that authority even...
...people necessary for the progression of dramatic conflicts, intent neither on using the camera for continuous personal statement nor establishing a flowing reality for the camera to record (the latter made impossible by the nature of the book). But in the scenes of the P.O.W.'s first entrance into Dresden, the camera--panning across the Ozlike cityscape, swooping down on the troops in narrow streets an courtyards, caressing gargoyles and sculpture with brief scanning motions--gives us, after editing, a man-made world quite different from any the Americans have ever known. When later in the film the prisoners emerge...