The enormous success of Vonnegut’s book in 1969 hadn’t been what you’d call unpredictable. The Zeitgeist giveth, and the Zeitgeist taketh away. The counterculture audience that had taken Vonnegut’s deliberately frail and fragmentary tale of Billy Pilgrim, bewildered POW and survivor of his own side’s 1945 firebombing of Dresden, to its bosom three years earlier had already curdled, grown fatigued, or just moved on. Hill’s adaptation wasn’t a hit in 1972, despite mostly positive reviews.

Selznick’s Gone with the Wind fused with Margaret Mitchell’s GWTW into a single pop artifact in the public’s memory. Yet to fans of the book, the movie is a long way from being talismanic, certainly not at the level-sorry, Kurt-that David O. It looks just swell, and it’s generally the opposite of a travesty. At the very least, Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five is sturdy, intelligent, interestingly cast, and often very affecting. Calling the result “flawless,” he effusively added, “I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book.” Upping the ante, he said the only other writer who should feel comparably grateful was Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind. But Kurt Vonnegut made an exception for George Roy Hill’s 1972 screen version of Slaughterhouse-Five. Because they’d grown up at their local Rialto, they took movieland’s bungling depredations personally. American novelists used to be notorious for grousing about how Hollywood loused up their books.

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