SOLDIER OF ORANGE [dutCH: SOLDAAT VAN ORANJE] 291
grand father clock. In the pro cess the clock topples onto Billy. It turns out the war
in Eu rope is over. Rus sian soldiers give Billy a drink to celebrate but he gags on it.
Billy and Montana have a baby on Tralfamadore, with the entire planet celebrating
with applause and an array of fireworks.
Reception
Slaughterhouse- Five premiered in the United States on 15 March 1972 and was
screened at the 25th Cannes Film Festival in May 1972, where it won the Jury
Prize. The film also won a Hugo Award and Saturn Award, and Michael Sacks was
nominated for a Golden Globe. A hard film to market, it received very limited dis-
tribution and did not do well at the box office. Reviews were mixed. Vincent Canby
called Slaughterhouse- Five “prob ably the most perfectly cast film in months” but went
on to observe that the “prob lem with the film, as it was with the novel, is that it’s
really not outraged or outrageous enough, much like its time- tripping gimmick”
(Canby, 1972). Conversely, film critic Frank Getlein termed Slaughterhouse- Five “an
extraordinary movie, a totally successful fusion of grim 20th century history and
science fiction fantasy in far outer space.” Unlike Canby, Getlein took the film’s
implicit message seriously: “With [the fire- bombing of] Dresden, the movie says,
we, the Allies, passed over into Hitlerian vio lence against the innocent for the sheer
love of vio lence. Even as they were defeated the Nazis won, for they converted us to
their barbaric doctrine of destruction for its own sake, a doctrine we still adhere to”
(Getlein, 1972). Vonnegut himself was thrilled with what the filmmakers had
accomplished: “I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless
translation of my novel Slaughterhouse- Five to the silver screen... I drool and cackle
every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I
wrote the book” (Vonnegut, 1972, p. xv).
Reel History Versus Real History
A moral indictment of war’s insanity, Slaughterhouse- Five never purported to be an
informative historical novel about the 1945 firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut
broadly based Billy Pilgrim’s experiences on his own war experiences; being cap-
tured during Hitler’s Ardennes offensive and later witnessing the terrible aftermath
of the Dresden firebombing as an American POW. The film follows the book quite
closely but omits the book’s first- person prologue, thus omitting Vonnegut himself
from the narrative. In the novel, the Tralfamadorian response to death and
destruction— “so it goes”—is repeated 106 times but is never spoken in the film.
SOLDIER OF ORANGE [DUTCH: SOLDAAT VAN
ORANJE] (1977)
Synopsis
Soldier of Orange is a Dutch war film directed and co- written by Paul Verhoeven,
produced by Rob Houwer, and starring Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbé. Based
on the 1970 autobiography Soldaat van Oranje by Dutch war hero Erik Hazelhoff
Roelfzema, the film is set during the World War II German occupation of the