Movie Review

March 23, 1972 Film: Time-Tripping With 'Slaughterhouse-Five'

By VINCENT CANBY "Slaughterhouse-Five," George Roy Hill's screen version of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s novel, is a wild, noisy, sometimes very funny film that eventually becomes as unstuck in its own exuberance as its hero, Billy Pilgrim, the Illium, N. Y., optometrist, is unstuck in time.

The things one remembers most vividly about the movie, which opened yesterday at the Sutton Theater, are its marvelous subsidiary characters and its affection for middle Americans of immense vulgarity and pride. When Billy's overweight wife tries to squeeze into her birthday present, a brand-new white Cadillac, she whines: "It's a little tight." When Billy congratulates Derby, his sweet-tempered, over-age Army buddy, on his way with words, Derby answers: "We didn't mince phraseologies at Boston Trades and Industrial."

"Slaughterhouse-Five," however, is not about Valencia or Derby or the absolutely stunning Hollywood starlet, Montana Wildhack, with whom Billy winds up spending the rest of eternity on the planet Tralfamadore. It's about the epic travail of Billy himself, through marriage, childhood, nervous breakdown, death and war (sometimes in that order, sometimes not). Billy time-trips from past to future and back again, thereby attaining the kind of serenity that could look like madness only to the people who find Vonnegut too deep for their tastes—which would include most of the characters Billy meets in life.

Billy Pilgrim, very nicely played by a new young actor named Michael Sacks, who looks like a cartoon fall-guy copied in flesh, is Everyman and, like most Everymen, he becomes a bit tiresome, since he never is allowed to express his own outrage with the human condition. Billy simply endures, a passive figure set against a background in which the author inventories man's idiocies to man, from the little deceptions of childhood to the legalized lunacies of war.

I thus have certain reservations about the point of the film—I mean I hate war too and I'm not sure that this sort of work does much more than increase our smug satisfaction with our own high-mindedness. Mr. Vonnegut, however, could not survive on high-mindedness alone, and Mr. Hill's achievement in "Slaughterhouse-Five" is in transferring to film, in a way that was lacking in "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," the author's ebullient senses of humor and chaos.

Second to "The Godfather," "Slaughterhouse-Five" is probably the most perfectly cast film in months, mostly with actors who have had little previous film experience, with the exception of Ron Liebman, so good in "Where's Poppa," who plays Billy's paranoid Army friend. They are all fine, out special mention must be made of Valerie Perrine as Billy's Hollywood starlet, Eugene Roche as Derby, and Sharon Gans as Billy's nice dumbbell of a wife.

The problem with the film, as it was with the novel, is that it's really not outraged or outrageous enough, much like its time-tripping gimmick. Not only do all movies time-trip, since all time in movies (including flashbacks) is a type of present, but so also do we, a dozen times a day, slip from the past into the future, and sometimes sideways, into visions of present moments, not as they really are but as they might be. The Cast SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, directed by George Roy Hill; screenplay by Stephen Geller, based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; director of photography, Mirolslav Ondricek; editor, Dede Allen; produced by Paul Monash; distributed by Universal Pictures. Running time: 104 minutes. At the Sutton Theater, 57th Street, east of Third Avenue. (The Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code and Rating Administration classifies this film "R—restricted, persons under 17 not admitted unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian.") Billy Pilgrim . . . . . Michael Sacks Paul Lazzaro . . . . . Ron Liebman Derby . . . . . Eugene Roche Valencia . . . . . Sharon Gans Montana Wildhack . . . . . Valerie Perrine Wild Bob Cody . . . . . Roborts Blossom Lioriel Marble . . . . . Sorrell Booke Robort . . . . . Perry King German Leader . . . . . Friedrich Ledebur Eliot Rosewater . . . . . Henry Bumstead Barbara . . . . . Holly Near Young German Guard . . . . . Nick Belle The Englishman . . . . . Tom Wood