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Slaughterhouse 5 Billy Pilgrim's time travels
Grab your socks, troops, 'cause the
screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut
Jr.'s best-selling novel,
Slaughterhouse-Five is a good one.
And that's saying a lot for an
American-made film these days.
The media mixing invites comment,
of course. And the film is true to the
novel in spirit, if not always in exact
transcription.
Vonnegut's tale of Billy Pilgrim,
who hat become unstuck in time, is
made toH be handled on film. The
time-traveling JhatJ Billy does is
handled easily"" by "flashback and
forward technique.
Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim does
a good job portraying the starry-eyed,
bashful time traveler. Because he
moves back and forth in time, it
appears to him as another perceivable
dimension. He sees his whole life as
easily as the rest of us might see from
here to the corner.
He moves essentially among three
times and places: World War II, where
he, a prisoner of war, lives through the
fire-bombing of Dresden; as a
middle-aged, successful businessman
with a fat wife and daughter and a
hoodlum teenage son; and on the
planet Tralfamadore where he is kept
in a domed, zoo-like atmosphere as an
Earth specimen for the
Tralfamadorians to ogle.
Each time, Sacks does Billy up just
fine.
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As the shy, naive Chaplain's
assistant at Dresden, Billy always
trusts in the goodness of man. Other
actors also turn in good performances
here, too.
Eugene Roche as Edgar Derby, the
kindly old vocational school teacher
turned enlisted man turned elected
leader of the captured American
troops, is the epitome of kindly-old,
etc. And Ron Liebman, as Paul
Lazzaro, the Ail-American soldier who
swears he'll kill Billy-and finally
does does a credible job.'
In his middle-aged time Billy is
accompanied by his wife (Sharon
Gans). She is a fat girl who Billy
married because it meant a good house
and income. Since he'd been able to
see his whole life through time travel
anyway, he knew it would at least be
bearable.
The Tralfamadorians are invisible in
the film; they exist in another
dimension. But they are vocal. The
Tralfamadorian spokesman is
constantly curious as to whether
"you're ready to mate now?"
Billy is kept in a dome supplied
with furnishings the Tralfamadorians
swiped from a Sears warehouse. He
later is joined by a starlet (Valerie
Perrine). The film eventually ends as
they have a baby and the cyanide
atmosphere of Tralfamadore explodes
into fireworks.
The point of the film, and the
book, is the inevitability of time. Billy
speaks to his Tralfamadorian guide:
"How how does the Universe
end?" Billy says.
"We blow it up, experimenting with
new fuels for our flying saucers. A
Tralfamadorian test pilot panics and
pushes the wrong button, and the
whole universe disappears."
"If you know this," Billy said,
"isn't there some way you can prevent
it? Can't you keep the pilot . from
pressing the button?"
"He has always pressed it, and he
always will. We always let him, we
always have let him, and we always
will let him. The moment is structured
that way."
The movie also preserves the wit
and humor of Vonnegut's book and
concocts some moments of its own.
When Billy's wife is driving madly to
him after he has been hospitalized
after an airplane accident, she wreaks
highway havoc the likes of which hasn't
been seen since W.C. Fields led his
troop of demolition drivers onto the
screen.
Thanks to pretty good direction by
George Roy Hill and really good
editing by Dede Allen, the movie ranks
in the vaguely-defined upper echelon
of recent American films like Catch 22
and A Clockwork Orange.
It has more in common with Catch
22, of course, both films are based on
philosophically left-wing novels. Both
have World War II as a major setting,
and the heroes of both films are
"Innocents."
All in all, Slaughterhouse-Five is a
fine film and a fine experience. It's
tood bad Yankee ingenuity can't
tackle more film projects with as much
success.
The Front Page will run every night
this week at Howell Theater.
Tuesday's foreign film is Love
Affair from Yugoslavia.
On Friday, Oct. 27, the Union
Special Films committee will meet at 7
p.m. in the Union to select films for
the spring semester. Committee
chairman Dan Ladely has invited
anyone interested in film to attend the
meeting.
Suggestions for possible films to be
shown will be accepted. The
committee plans to book as many
films as possible for the spring session.
Wednesday and Thursday nights the
Coffee House series presents White
, Eyes in the Union. White Eyes, a rock
k group, played here last year and (
i,':appajntly impressed enough people
to be asked back. It's free, too.
The Weekend Film will be that
struggle of man versus rats, Willard.
'Fat City'
bums, boxing
in California
Review by Roy Baldwin
We drive in past the city limits sign of
Stockton, California, and see how the golden
dream of the golden state lies in
urban -renewal construction chaos. It's
morning.
Kris Kristofferson sings "Help Me Make It
Through the Night," and Stockton's bums
blink in astonishment at the bright
California proof of having made it through
to one more day of growing older.
Billy Tully wakes up in his flop house
room in his undershorts with his arm around
his pillow, searches through a maze of
schnappes bottles for a match, and does not
find one.
No doubt about it, John Huston knows
how to direct an opening scene.
The bums of Stockton who wait in the
wqrld outside Billy's window are all the
bums one has ever seen. They are the real
stars of this movie. We wonder at them how
did they get so old and their faces so like
parchment?
Billy Tully ends the slow, frantic, losing
search for fire, puts on his pants, strides out
into the California sunshine and starts to tell
the answer.
Fat City succeeds despite some clumsy
filmwork by director Huston. It succeeds
because of the characters, who move in their
world with a itrange grace that recalls scene
frbrri Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture
Show.
Fat Citv is the storv df how Blllv Tullv
becomes acquainted with death.
Stacy Keach is magnificent and gracefulN
as the washed-up boxer just short of his
thirtieth birthday, bearing the scars of a
thousand illegal eye cuts and the burden of
slowly dying with drink and despair.
Jeff Bridges, who you will remember
from Last Picture Show, is believable as the
eighteen-year old discovered by Billy at the
local YMCA, but he's in danger of becoming
typecast in this kind of role.
Susan Tyrell steals most of her scenes as
Ona, Billy's girlfriend, perpetually drunk and
unkempt. Picture Martha Raye of, say,
1943, getting a chance to play a serious role.
She's excellent.
The best scenes take place in the dingy
bars where the two meet and pursue their
clumsy love. Ona and Billy fall drunkenly in
love, although due to the heavy-handed and
stupid censoring of the film by either the
State Theater or their distributing company,
you would hardly guess It.
How ridiculous to show a preview of
some Swedish flick replete with naked
breasts and everything and then X out the
only bedroom scene in Fat City. It would
seem as if Lincoln theaters have a long way
to come in showing common respect for the
movies they play.
In spite of all this, Ona and Billy are
elegant in their total drunkeness. They toast
each other over cream sherry and fall out the
door.
But enough of love. Fat City is about
boxing and dreams and death-about the
city of dreams that Billy begins to realize he
will never reach. Keach's amazing
performance shows a real understanding of
and sympathy for the types that inhabit the
world of the small-time ring. To them
boxing is romance and invincibility and
manhood.
In their world they are knights-errant;
they reduce the world and their dead-end
lives to the simple metaphors of the ring.
But Billy finds that all struggle, however
poetic, is futile.
Shortly before the metaphorical end of
his life Billy, drunk again, sits in a recreation
hall and observes, "Before yotl get rollin',
your life makes a bee line for the grave."
It is his epitaph, and a fitting conclusion
for the end of a marvelouJ movie.
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'Front Page' opening
Review by Bruce Borin
The Front Page opened the University theatre's season
Friday night with all the noise and intensity of a three ring
circus. The problem with a three ring circus is that nothing has
your full attention. There seemed to be no real focus to any
moment of the show; nothing ever built to a climax.
The first act moved quickly and occasionally you could
even understand some words. The action of this act is
concerned with some 1924 reporters, bored with having to
wait up all night to cover the hanging of a young Bolshevik
murderer, on edge because nothing is happening, bickering
among themselves and having some fun talking a buffoon cop
into running out after hamburgers for them.
The whole act, however, is played with as much intensity as
the scene where Molly, "the tart," flings hers.ilf out of a
window, in a very heart-rending attempt to save her young
man's life. Her noble act is lost in a frenzy of inconsequential
activity.
I couldn't figure out how the director, Orlin Larson,
intended us to react to his characters. At times they were
straight from vaudeville, and instead of sincere, roguish, blood
and guts newsmen, we ended up with almost cartoon versions
of Daymon Runyon.
I don't want to criticize Larson's interpretation because I'm
not really sure what it was. There was no consistency of style
among the actors at all.
The actors were, for the most part, , young and
inexperienced. They seemed to have no idea of the beats or
rhythm of the play. I would guess what Larson did was to try
and find at least one playable quality in each actor with no
regard whatsoever for a uniform style.
Perhaps if some work had been done to achieve unity
among the green actors they would have been better able to
handle this remarkably ageless play without seeming to
lampoon it. The work of Glenn Cox, Donovan Diez and
Christine Qualset was commendable.
' The actor who brought it all together was Bill Wallis as
Walter Burns. Wallis displayed control, stage presence and a
very dynamic, honest characterization. Burns is talked about
and eluded to all through the first half of the play, and when
finally seen, Wallis is everything he was cracked up to be and
more.
At last here was someone I cared about, evert though he was
every inch a bastard.
As Front Page settles into its week long run, perhaps the
actors wilUalm down, learn to play their audience and make
their points.
.
monday, October 23, 1972
page 6
ddily nebraskan
