Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seen them Tokyo Story and The Rulong Class. And a couple of others should be cited as intelligent entertainment--Sam Peckinpah's Bonner, hampered slightly by unbelievable dialogue but far superior in his latest piece of backwork (The Getaway) and Slaughterhouse-Five George Roy Hill's skilled adaptation of Vonnegut's novel...
...GOES," as Kurt Vonnegut says, but for a director of Chabrol's stature, it never should go like that. As cheap Freudianism expands into cheap theology, even a skillful development of suspense is neglected. The "second level" with which Chabrol's idol Hitchcock expands the thriller here comes forward and overwhelms the story. What could have been turned into suspense or shock--the identity of Helene's murderer--is abbreviated and intellectualized into a sort of "wrap-up" scene between Paul and Theo. It is the philosophy professor, significantly, who has to figure out that...
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...
Luckily, the film rights to the book feel to a middleman as craftsmanship and intelligent as Vonnegut himself--and certainly more restrained in his celebration of innocence. I would never have expected these qualities from the man's record: director George Roy Hill has previously given us such pedestrian derivatory fairy tales as Hawaii and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Here he sticks to the book in knowledgeable, workmanlike fashion, even clearing up some narrative mess, making the whole more consistent and straightforward and thus more powerful. What he and a skilled novice screenwriter (Stephen Geller) have done...
...that's Hill's big touch, and he otherwise relies squarely on Vonnegut. Vonnegut is no Heller--he can't truck with theory or the wide scope that precedes it. But he's touched upon the major fears of our century, and had us feel his despair. And by being true to Vonnegut, George Roy Hill has produced a moving (if cerebrally uninteresting) film, which has less pretension and more honesty to it than such an adaptation of a much worthier book as Mike Nichol's film of Catch...