Other Titles • Slaughterhouse-Five • Schlachthof 5 (1972)
Synopses for Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)
1.
Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) has a problem with time: he keeps jumping about in his own life, principally between three key scenes. The "present" is a kind of glowing suburban bliss involving a dutiful wife, large house, and presidency of the local Lions; the "past" is being a prisoner of World War II and experiencing the firebombing of Dresden from the wrong side; the "future" takes place in a glass dome on the planet Tralfamadore, to which Billy has been mysteriously spirited along with the woman of his fantasies (Montana Wildhack, played by Valerie Perrine). It isn't meant to make too much sense, since the point is to represent a man (and a century) that has witnessed things too unbearable for a wholly sane person to make sense of. In fact author Kurt Vonnegut's anguished cry on the insanity of war is one of those completely unfilmable books, so director George Roy Hill gets points even for trying. The whole package is thought provoking in a wholly Vonnegutian way. All this, and Glenn Gould playing Bach as well. --Richard Farr
(52 votes)
2.
An aimless bumbler is pushed into service during World War II and later winds up in a German prison camp known as Slaughterhouse 5 . But his life takes a strange turn when the ties that bind him to normal time and space loosen. Flipping from the war to an extraterrestrial zoo, the hapless hero sees different phases of his life but never quite understands what is expected from him.
(48 votes)
3.
George Roy Hill's adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's whimsical antiwar black comedy--an immensely popular novel at the time of the film's release because of its implicit condemnation of the war in Vietnam--stars Michael Sacks as the placid Billy Pilgrim. He's become "unstuck in time," as the author describes him, or more prosaically, he's had a nervous breakdown as a result of a recurrence of the trauma of witnessing the horrific Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945. The desultory narrative has Billy jumping from his war experience to his future on the planet Tralfamadore with the buxom Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine), then to an episode of shock therapy, then to an episode in his childhood, and then to his life as a relatively unhappy suburban optometrist. Throughout, the naive Billy remains a curious mixture of kindness and detachment, the best combination of qualities one could have, the author seems to imply, for surviving in a world of meaningless suffering. Vonnegut's novel may be unfilmable, and Hill may have been too cautious a choice as director, but he does a good job of conveying many of the qualities of the author's elusive style. Michael Sacks possesses the requisite air of innocence for his role, and Ron Liebman gives a great performance as a choleric fellow G.I.
(47 votes)
4.
A man becomes unstuck in time in the film that became a classic.
This is the story of Billy Pilgrim who is ordinary in almost every respect but one: he has come unstuck in time and jumps back and forth in his life with no control over where he is going next. Part of one morning he might spend on a distant planet Tralfamadore with sexy movie bombshell Montana Wildhack, and at the same time be in a ditch in Belgium in World War II where he is set upon by GI's Paul Lazzaro and Roland Weary, and then captured by German soldiers. Then Billy finds himself on his honeymoon night with his bride, the overweight, but rich Valencia Merble. Back in the war, Billy is marching with other prisoners, when he is pulled from the line to pose for pictures for a German press photographer. And so it goes on, from past, to present, to future, until finally realizes that in order to survive even to his death which, again, jumping around in time, he watches in Philadelphia, he must concentrate on the good things and ignore te bad in life.
(51 votes)
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