Slaughterhouse-Five
Short description
Billy Pilgrim is a Second World War veteran who has become unstuck in time, moving without warning between moments of his life. He passes from his childhood to his years as a prisoner of war in Dresden, where a catastrophic bombing looms, and to a later existence on the distant planet Tralfamadore. The film follows his attempts to make sense of a life that refuses to stay in order.
George Roy Hill directed this 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, working from a screenplay by Stephen Geller. It arrived between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, the fourth of the nine features Hill directed. Michael Sacks plays Billy, with Ron Leibman, Eugene Roche, Sharon Gans, Valerie Perrine and Holly Near among the cast of twenty-four credited performers.
Made for about three million dollars and released in March 1972, the film runs one hundred minutes and blends drama, science fiction and war. On IMDb it holds a 6.8 rating from roughly fifteen thousand votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.5 from a much smaller pool of voters. A critics' score of 7.5 from seventeen reviews places it above both audience measures.
What's left behind the scenes
- The famous phrase “And so it goes” appears over 100 times in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s (1922-2007) novel (1969), but is not spoken at all in this film adaptation.
- Shortly before the bombing of Dresden, a Howard Campbell Jr. addresses the American prisoners of war. In 1961, Vonnegut wrote the novel “Mother Night,” centering around this character, and later Kit Gordon filmed a movie (1996) based on it starring Nick Nolte.
- An adaptation of the novel of the same name by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
- The film was shot in the United States in the state of Minnesota and in Czechoslovakia in Prague.
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the author of the literary source material, was a prisoner of war during World War II. He was captured on December 22, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, while serving as a scout in the 106th Infantry Division. The same fate befalls the book's protagonist, who is sent to a concentration camp by the Germans. Among other things, Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden and also described it in his novel.
- When Billy’s mother visits him in the hospital, she talks about what he experienced in Dresden with Eliot Rosewater. This is the hero of Vonnegut’s 1965 novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” who was later played by Ken Hudson Campbell in Alan Rudolph’s comedy “Breakfast of Champions” (1999).
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