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Page 10 The Other Paper Flick Review Slaughterhouse Five By Robert Monell Kurt Vennegut Jr.’s satirical anti-war bestseller SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE revolves around the firebombing of Dresden, Germany by the Allied Forces during the last days of World War II. The protagonist of the book, a chaplain’s assistant named Billy Pilgrim , is in Dresden, as an American prisoner of war, during the homing, and survives. But the most extraor dinary thing about Billy, Vonnegut tells us, is not his ability to survive almost any disaster, natural or man-made, he has the misfortune to be involved in (he is also the sole survivor of a plane crash years after the war), but the fact that he is “unstruck in time”. Or more exactly, he has taken refuge in time. Billy Pilgrim, who Vonnegut moves through time and space as if he were a cosmic pinball, has been kidnapped by a flying saucer and taken to the planet of Tralfamadore. The inhabitants of this distant star live in the fourth dimension, and, in Vonnegut’s words, “Can look at all the dif ferent moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky mountains. . . they can look at any moment that interests them.” Really, the plot of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE defies any attempt at a coherent synopsis. The point of the book is that Billy Pilgrim has fled from the horrors of war, modern suburbia, and life in general and is living simultaneously in the past, present and future. He . inhabits a dreamland made up of memories, cheap advertising art, standard male fantasies, and fourth rate science fiction novels. Almost everyone Billy loves, befriends, is related to, or comes into contact with, is killed. But Billy always survives. Even the cataclysmic inferno of Dresden’s destruction cannot snub out his life. Billy’s wife, Valencia, dies an absurd, senseless death; Billy’s only friend in the Army is shot for stealing a teapot; and what is Billy’s response to all this suffering and death? A simple, soothing, “So it goes”. Billy has learned from the Tralfamadorians that time is a string of moments. “Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones,” they tell him. He takes their advice of course, and when he is returned to earth he en counters a pompous facist who is defending the bombing of Dresden. Billy answers him with, “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore.” Billy Pilgrim is the overloaded, wasted, basically decent citizen who has flipped out into the Tralfamadore of TV-land, super markets, and banal occupations. The realization of horror has made him catatonic, and although he still feels, his ability to react has been destroyed. Vonnegut shows us what a pathetic human being Billy Pilgrim is, and he shows us the elements of hypocrisy and absur dity that have robbed him of his humanity. Vonnegut counterpoints the mention of every death with the exasperating panacea Billy com forts himself with, “So it goes”. The best that can be said about the movie version of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is that it misses the entire point of Vonnegut’s parable. Actually, it is a film without a theme. Perhaps the problem is that Vonnegut did not write the screenplay. Stephen Geller’s scenario shows an almost total lack of sensitivity to what the novel is all about. He crams as many of the book’s characters and events into the script as possible. The only idea that the film con tains is that dropping out is a groove, the film ends with Billy and his All American sex fantasy Montana Wildhack, admiring their new baby inside a zoo covered by a geodesic dome while the Tralfam a d o rians explode fireworks in the plantet’s cyanide atmosphere. The rotten special ef fects come to us second hand from Kubrick’s 2001, and are supposed to convince us what a trip scene time travelling is. Maybe some of that cyanide from Tralfamadore’s atmosphere should have leaked into Geller’s script. Vonnegut’s taut, biting treatment is missing. The scenario needs the tough sardonic tone which can turn juvenile humor into black comedy. Why, for instance, did Geller choose to leave out Billy’s exasperating, “So it goes”? Did he consider it irrelevant? Was it too repetitive? If a screenwriter is going to stick as close to a book’s structure and plot as Geller does, he had better know how and what to choose. This script is soft and literal where it should be hard and economical. Director George Roy Hill must have wandered on the set still exhuberant from his success with BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. He was probably all set to drift through another well written comedy script when he actually got a look at what Geller had written. So instead he decided to give us another “serious” anti-war movie, with touches of what he considers to be “black humor”. Valencia Pilgrim’s death scene, so absurdly funny and ghastly in the book, due mainly to Von- negut’s casual manner of handling it (he only devotes a few sentences to it), is transferred into a major segment of the movie. We must watch her smash into various vehicles and pedestrians, like Popeye Doyle in THE FRENCH CONNECTION, while on her way to the hospital where Billy is lying seriously injured. This cheap, silly five minute long vignette charac terizes just what is wrong with Geller’s conception and Hill’s direction. These men will do anything for a laugh; sensitivity, subtlty, and meaning are just stum bling blocks and “slow a film down”, this petty, sophmoric type of “comedy” is easier to do. On the other hand, the fire bom bing of Dresden, the central scene in the book, is cut down to a few shots of the survivors coming out of their shelters and surveying some “apocalyptic” rubble that looks like a leftover set from WAR OF THE WORLDS. During the actual bombing we are left in a darkened bunker with the frightened men. The bewilderization of this scene, which should have been the film’s climax, is an example of the cowar dice the filmmaker’s exhibit as their credentials. Did they leave the details out simply to save money, or out of some spinless, pandering tendency to be “tasteful and inoffensive” . In Ingmar Bergman’s SKAMMEN the napaiming of the small island the two main characters inhabit sticks in the memory. Bergman uses the wheezing and panting of the hets to invoke a kind of unseen encom passing terror. We see the flames are down out of the sky but we do not see the planes that drop them. The physical characteristics of sound and flames are used almost abstractly, we get not the violence but the equivalent of violence; but them akersof SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE do not even suggest the horror of a firebombing raid, they cop out. M iroslav O n d ricek’s cinematography makes the film stunning to look at. The scene where Billy and several hundred others American Prisoners are her ded through the streets of Dresden for the first time is shot in beautiful gray and green tones, but then the scene begins to go on and on, and as the camera pans past en dless statues, cathedrals, and either impeccable examples of Gothic ar chitecture (this segment was shot in Prague) we begin to get the feeling that the director is trying to tell us something. This interminable scene is supposed to prepare us for the ultimate destruction (which we never see anyways) of all this beauty. Still, the film is intelligently cast and Michael Sacks performs credibly as Billy Pilgrim. He is physically very much like Von negut describes Billy, “He didn’t look like a soldier at all, he looked like a filthy flaminge”, and the make-up is generally very good. Holly Near and Perry King are fine in their small but important roles as Billy’s two offspring. Best of all is the talented young Ron Liebman, who perfectly embodies Billy’s arch enemy, Paul Lazzaro. Liebman’s comic mugging, lethal humor, and generally overheated manner combine in a sinister, canny performance. But the actors portraying some of the book’s minor character’s (a bum on a train, Wild Bob, Mr. Rosewater) are hardly given any chance to work up a charac terization. Again, this is due to Geller’s sloppy, overloaded script. These people seem like clumsy in truders. The Trial Of The Catonville Nine D irected by G o r d o n D a v idson P roduced by G r e g o ry Peck Review ed by Jo h n B e rger/ A lternative F e a tu r e s Service Here is the kind of film that really should be shown in Middle America and probably won’t be. Within 90 minutes, it condemns the Vietnam War, lambasts the Catholic Church, and challenges the American legal system, and of course, by im p lication, the American way of life. It is any wonder that The Trial o f the Catonsville Nine has already closed in New York and Los Angeles and has only been shown once in San Francisco—at an ACLU benefit? No, don’t stop reading now. . . Naturally, attacking the main stays of American life automatically limits a film’s audience and is bad for the box of fice. Americans catching their Friday night show don’t want to hear a bunch of radicals running down the country, especially if the stars of the show bristle with righteous indignation as they at tack the sacred majority’s sickly cows, and proselytize passionately for civil disobedience. The film opens with a series of jerky, hand-held black and white shots of nine militant Catholics, including priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan. The group is in the Selective Service office of Caton- sville, Maryland, where they seize the files of young men about to be drafted. Outside the building, in full daylight, they set the records ablaze with homemade napalm, then stand around the burning em bers for about a quarter of an hour explaining their act to newsmen while they wait to be arrested. When the inevitable happens, the perpetrators voluntarily give their names to the police and step cooperatively into the paddy wagon. One participant obligingly speels out his name for the arresting officer. The date is May 17, 1968. The ensuing trial holds no suspense in the traditional sense since it is evident throughout that the militants will be found guilty: they never seek the court’s mercy or deny they have violated the law. Our attention must instead be welded to the sereen by the power of the moral issues raised during the trial—and the film does succeed in presenting these dramatically. The Berrigans and their colleagues knowingly break Federal law to save lives and bear witness to American genocide in Vietnam, thereby showing that a higher law makes precedence over the laws of men. But the court refuses to admit conscience or religious belief as a justification for the commission of a “crime”. The prosecutor concedes that the entire Vietnam War may be illegal and the defense maintains that since this is so, the right to stop the war by interferring with the Selective Service System is clear. The court, in an attempt to exclude events of the world from the courtroom, recognizes only that laws were broken by the defendants and admits no ex tenuating circumstances. With tremendous irony and pathos, the defendants are found guilty because they risked their own fate to stop the napaiming of human beings by napaiming pieces of paper. They accept their verdict in religious ecstasy, aware of the glory of their act while the scene resonates with the share of a nation which wages a barbarous war and crucifies those brace enough to stand up against its wrath. The reading of Daniel Berrigan s eloquent “Meditation on Caton- sville” heightens the impact. For its outspoken handling of pre-eminent political and moral issues seldom boldly confronted in commercial American films, The Trial o f the Calonsville Nine is well worth seeing. Moreover, Movement and campus film groups should try to show it to whatever audience they can muster, par ticularly in view of the distributors’ flagging interest because the film isn’t making enough money. If shown to a maintream audience composed of politically apathetic Americans, The Trial would probably goad people at least into examining some deeply held prejudices. It might even sway a few but it is basically too strong and abrasive a statement. But, if as is more likely, the film attracts an audience already in sympathy with the Berrigans, then it stands a beautiful chance of maximizing its effect. The Trial would probably goad people at least into examinging some deeply held prejudices. It might even sway a few, but it is basically two strong and abrasive a statement. But, if as is more likely, the film attracts an audience already in sympathy with the Berrigans, then it stands a beautiful chance of maximizing its effect. The defendants’ willingness to stand up and suffer for their beliefs catches at the consciences of all who hold those beliefs too, without acting on them. Yet the Catonsville Nine’s apparent urge to suffer, a Christian proclivity, is peripheral to, and probably inimical to, the revoluntionary nature of their act. Had the defendants just wanted to commit a symbolic act and test the illegality of the war, they could have taken a simple file from Draft Board 33 and made a test case of it, thereby escaping or minimizing punishment. No, the defendants claim they could not have been satisfied to do that. Instead, by destroying nearly 400 files, they were actually preventing killing. However, if that were their motive, why then were they so damn open about their sabotage? Why didn’t they go un derground so they could assail a succession of draft boards all over the country, saving far more men from war and wreaking havoc with the Selective Service System? ' The Catonsville Nine wanted to inspire war resistance—but could be that they were so concerned^ with vaunting their well-earned moral superiority that they may not have chosen the most effective way to oppose the war? Their self- righteous tones and the moral prerogatives they invoked as Christians leads to this conclusion. Yet how can we judge them? W A N T E D TUTORS NEEDED FOR ALPHA BETA GAMMA •> Call 469-7706 PAYS *5.00 AN WITH 3 STUDENTS STUDENTS: For Totoriog Help, See Yoor lastrottor or Coooselor.
