Word: vonnegut
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Many Americans could be forgiven if they entertained a fantasy from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Unstuck in time, the character named Billy Pilgrim runs a movie of World War II in his head-backward: "When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business...
...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...
...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...