FANTASIA OBSCURA: An “Unfilmable” Novel That Became a Cinematic Cult Classic
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, when you move away from the source material, you can say so much more than Poo-tee-weet…
Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Directed by: George Roy Hill
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has an interesting place in terms of the genre canon, to put it mildly. On the one hand, he’s never really called himself an SF writer, holding that his work is more mainstream, although strongly within the magical realism camp, using the tropes and themes of the genre to best relate his work. On the other hand, for someone who wields such tools as a non-practitioner, he shows a master’s understanding and appreciation of the forms when he puts them to use.
The fact that one of his works would wind up in the hands of the man who was better known for directing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting and still end up being one of the most potent genre films of all time would, of course, be just perfect:
An adaptation Vonnegut’s 1969 novel, subtitled The Children’s Crusade, the film also follows the life of Billy Pilgrim, played here by Michael Sacks in his first credited role. We follow Pilgrim through most of his life, concentrating on his being captured by the Germans 
during the Battle of the Bulge and subsequent term as a POW who survived the bombing of Dresden, before his marriage to Valencia (Sharon Gans in her only feature and last credited work) and becoming an optometrist in Ilium, NY, where he raised two children, Barbara (Holly Near) and Robert (Perry King). We see his interactions with Paul Lazzlo (Rob Leibman), who had such a dislike for Pilgrim that he ultimately kills him in 1978, and with the starlet Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine in her first credited feature role), who Billy sees naked in Playboy and a Roman gladiator pic at the drive-in long before he’s kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians and made to mate with her on another world…
But to read about the film (and the book, too) in the abstract does not begin to convey the breadth of 
the work, or allow you to experience the impact of Billy’s condition. Because Pilgrim is “unstuck in time,” he experiences his life in a non-linear manner, going from past to future and back almost at random. “Almost” being the key word here, as both works find ways to transition between events seamlessly, in what feels like a natural flow between all occurrences out of sequence.
For Hill, the cuts are fluid, with audio cues bleeding between scene changes and positioning the cast in such a way as to anchor them between set pieces. We could almost assume that this was just the way poor Billy’s mind jumbled through everything, a symptom of a bad case of PTSD, had there not been the scene at the Ilium Airport where Billy sees the rescuers who will save his life after his chartered flight crashes a few moments later, characters he would not have met before the incident:
By including this scene in the film, Hill makes a strong statement as to the reality of Pilgrim’s progress through time. With that one moment, there is a clear declaration that Billy is indeed unstuck, and that this is indeed a genre film. Which makes us feel even more connected to Pilgrim; by making this an actual physical journey, we feel more that we’re along for the ride, more so than we might were we able to dismiss it as all in his head.
And in terms of feeling, we got a lot of strong performances from the cast for the film. Sacks’ Pilgrim does a fantastic job of giving us the full measure of the man, from his youth in 1945 through his death in 1978; the makeup work by John Chambers and Mark Reedall solidly contribute to Sacks’ performance. We also get one of the screen’s greatest villains in Leibman’s Lazzlo, a character who’s so creepy we actually show some sympathies for the Germans who he goes after, when Lazzo’s not taking it out on fellow American POWs.
What gives the film its great power over and above what we get from it (including Glen Gould’s score, adapting Bach’s works for the screen) is the overall theme carried over from the novel. Vonnegut, who himself was a POW captured during the Ardennes assault and witnessed the bombing of Dresden, used his work to not only process what he went through, but also discourse on the futility of war and the horror that human beings are willing to at best ignore, and at worst revel in, in pursuit of their limited objectives. The fact that the Tralfamadorians with their fourth-dimensional existences (depicted in the film as being balls of light with off-screen voices) can see everything happening at once and existing simultaneously, have to question humanity’s request for free will, helps us put the horrors of the 20th Century in perspective, and forces us to ask why we do what we do.
Coming as both the book and film did during the height of the Vietnam War, the story forces us to re-examine and ask hard questions of ourselves. It was a potent message against the cruelties of war then, and still poses questions worth asking now as we engage in all the petty and short-sighted actions of people who don’t care how cruel we are to each other, a plea for self-realization and for controlling our worst impulses.
An interesting question to consider, speaking of impulses: What could Universal have done had they in 1972 been thinking about films the way they would in 2018. With the rights to Slaugherhouse-Five, the studio might have considered other works by Vonnegut, building upon their interconnectedness. With the proper mindset, they could have had the character of Eliot Rosewater, played in the film here by Henry Bumstead, ready as the lead in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. They could have had the Tralfamadorians on deck for their own direct appearance in The Sirens of Titans. The film could have retained the character Kilgore Trout from the novel (who was in the novel yet cut from the screenplay, as was Vonnegut himself as the narrator of the book) and then set up a much better version of Breakfast of Champions than the one that hit screens in 1999.
Had the studio been thinking like a Trafalmadorian, we might have had a “Vonnegut-verse” that would have rivaled their monsters, and certainly done better than their “Dark Universe” had done. So it goes.
NEXT TIME: And so it is Christmas, and here’s another fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into…
