Peace, free will, and art are … the essence of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five; but George Roy Hill's movie of the same name is redolent of different juices entirely. Hill's burden was heavy: he not only had to reconceive the story according to his own filmic lights, he had to reverence the details of the fiction as so many cult objects for his projected audience. And his artifices do not suffice to carry the load.

His failure is similar to that of Mike Nichols with Catch 22. [Joseph] Heller's text was so cluttered with cult objects that Nichols' reconception of the story in film form, with abundant optical and structural gimmickry, was topweighted with the demands of the literary paraphernalia. Hill never even tried, as Nichols clearly did, to integrate the obligatory items into the movie's story. The appearances of Wild Bob from Cody, Wyoming, and of Eliot Rosewater in a Lake Placid mental hospital, for example, serve no purpose whatsoever in the movie except to remind viewers, perhaps, of significances lost from the book. Rosewater's main function is to introduce Kilgore Trout to Billy Pilgrim, but neither Trout nor his science fiction appears in the movie. Still, Trout is not the major character lost from the text—that is the narrator, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. of Indianapolis and Barnstable.

This novel adapts itself to reduction to statements of essence better than most, though there are three separate statements, like the voices of a fugue, in a tripartite essence and structure. First and foremost, it is an anti-war document, conceived in anguish for firebomb-destroyed Dresden and dedicated to the propositions that war is an absurd assertion of man's will, that it must be revealed in all its absurdity, and that all men must see the futility and desperate irony in all the manifestations of war, past, present and future…. Slaughterhouse-Five is a denunciation of war, written compulsively to denounce war, designed to denounce war, and fulfilled by the litany of that denunciation. This is the element that has won a large audience among the peace-seeking young.

Second, it is a science fiction that deals with the topic of free will versus fatalism and a related philosophical issue of the nature of time. If the self-assertiveness of humanity inevitably leads to war, the alternative is a kind of sublime acceptance of everything. This is the fatalistic message from Tralfamadore brought to earth by Billy Pilgrim. The Tralfamadorian response to death and destruction, however violent, pointless, mindless, brutal, or unnecessary, is, "So it goes." (pp. 127, 129)

Third, Slaughterhouse-Five is a book about the writing of the book. The whole first section is a kind of foreword in which Vonnegut, in propria persona, talks about the conception of the book, the history of its composition, some of the research involved, the incident that supplied the subtitle, and the personal significance of the whole project. Then, throughout the narration, there are frequent interjections like "I was there" or "That was me, the author of this book" to remind us to distinguish the voices and to keep this element in mind. (pp. 129-30)

Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five resembles its source only superficially, sometimes translating to the screen textural details that are pointless in their new context. The sci-fi time concept seems perfectly suited to cinematic structure. Indeed Bily's time travel (called "time-tripping" in the now dialogue of the movie) becomes the editing rationale of the whole film. Good idea, poor execution. In practice, what we get is an elaborate exercise in the kind of "thematic cut" that was so popular in the late Fifties.

Of the tripartite essence of the book, a complete transformation has taken place. Instead of a compulsive anti-war statement, there is an anti-establishment theme that slightly alters the base of audience support. The anti-war element remains implicit, as in the blank faces of the Russian prisoners in the German camp, but it supplies material for some splendid snow shots in the opening sequence and the broad satiric scene of the British prisoners welcoming the Yanks. We don't even see any of the Dresden bombing, just Billy's gawking tour of the lovely city (Prague) before and the rather unconvincing sets of rubble after.

Instead of Vonnegut's bitter irony of fatalistic acceptance, Hill presents a comedy based on destruction and distortion. The biggest laugh-getter is the sequence of Valencia's drive to the hospital, a zany highway bit that features the demolition of her Cadillac and incidental casualties to many others, climaxed in her hornblaring, crashing death by carbon monoxide poisoning outside the emergency entrance. So it goes: and note, again, the disparity of tones. The sound track is leaned heavily upon for laughs, but it is a very frail support, at times insupportable itself as it attempts to make fun of social patterns and institutions. The overwhelmingly impressive sound of the Clockwork Orange experience may get in the way here, but the sound in Slaughterhouse-Five seems by turns shrill, blatant, gross, and gauche, undercutting whatever satiric or comedic effectiveness it was intended to have. This element may have audience appeal, too, but to my subjective ear a comparable theater crowd enjoyed its laughs at What's Up, Doc? much more.

Finally, instead of the writing of the book … we get a new theme—the natural versus the mechanical. And this is what really gets the audience with it. When Billy and Montana Wildhack successfully mate, we rejoice with the invisible Tralfamadorians, and when Montana nurses the infant in the film's final, triumphant gesture, we necessarily join in the Tralfamadorian applause. It is a winning—and winsome—device, and we depart in a kind of mindless chuckle at what feels good.

But where have all the powers gone? A potentially potent property has become as slight as Billy Pilgrim's person. Vonnegut's ironic point about pornographic pictures, even, has faded into the naive non-prurience of the zoo-goers. The Tralfamadorians have disappeared. They have become invisible, disembodied voices…. [The] life has gone out of the story with its essence, despite undeniable innate appeal, certain charm, and an intelligent structural concept. Hill's failure is far from complete, rather on the order of Arthur Penn's with Little Big Man…. What both Hill and Penn gained by shooting and playing for laughs and gut responses, they lost in the weakening of overall content or—not to be mealymouthed about it—integrity. Listen: Slaughterhouse-Five has come unstuck in itself. (pp. 130-31)