Slaughterhouse-Five: The Novel and the Movie Essay -- Movie Film compa

Slaughterhouse-Five: The Novel and the Movie In 1972 director George Roy Hill released his screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (or The Children's Crusade; A Duty Dance With Death). The film made over 4 million dollars and was touted as an "artistic success" by Vonnegut (Film Comment, 41). In fact, in an interview with Film Comment in 1985, Vonnegut called the film a "flawless translation" of his novel, which can be considered an honest assessment in light of his reviews of other adaptations of his works: Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971) "turned out so abominably" that he asked to have his name removed from it; and he found Slapstick of Another Kind (1984) to be "perfectly horrible" (41,44). (This article was writen prior to Showtime's Harrison Bergeron, and Fine Line's Mother Night). A number of other Vonnegut novels have been optioned, but the film projects have either been abandoned during production or never advanced beyond an unproduced screenplay adaptation, indicating the difficulty of translating Vonnegut to the silver screen. So why does Slaughterhouse-Five succeed where others fail? The answer lies in how the source is interpreted on screen. Overall, while there are some discrepancies that yield varying results, the film is a faithful adaptation that succeeds in translating the printed words into visual elements and sounds which convincingly convey the novel's themes. While Vonnegut's literary style is very noticeable in Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel as a whole differs from the majority of his other works because it is personal with an interesting point of view techniq... ...kle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book" (Film Comment 41). Whether or not someone who has not read the novel could get some meaning from the film is hard to decide, but if one considers that it would take just about as long to watch the movie as it would to read the book, the decision should be obvious. Works Cited Bianculli, David. "A Kurt Post-mortem on the Generally Eclectic Theatre." Film Comment Nov.-Dec. 1985: 41-44. Loeb, Monica. Vonnegut's Duty-Dance With Death. UMEA, 1979. Nelson, Joyce. "Slaughterhouse-Five: Novel and Film." Literature/Film Quarterly. 1 (1973): 149-153. Slaughterhouse-Five, dir. George Roy Hill, with Michael Sacks, Universal Pictures, 1972. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell Publishing, 1968.