Soft-Core Satire

By J.C.

The film version of Kurt Vonnegut's recent play Happy Birthday, Wanda June brings to the screen for the first time a widely read and respected writer. Since Happy Birthday, Wanda June is an especially inept movie, it would be comforting to report that Vonnegut has been victimized by the Hollywood barbarians, his work vulgarized beyond recognition. But it is not so. Vonnegut's own company (called, with inadvertent irony, Sourdough Ltd.) co-produced the film. His name appears in the traditional superstar's position above the title, implying not only box office eminence but a certain pride.

There is little to boast of here. The original play has been transported to the screen apparently by moving van. The sets might pass muster on a stage but look like pasteboard before the camera lens. Director Mark Robson records the action from a static position corresponding to front row center. The actors pass before the camera, mouthing lines of thimble-witted dialogue ("There stand the loins from which you sprang"; "Everything you do is so tragically irrelevant") that are open pleas for some heavy editing.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June is a softcore satire on the trappings and traditions of heroism. The hero, Harold Ryan (Rod Steiger), is part Odysseus, part Hemingway. Returning home after eight years of adventuring, he finds that in his absence his wife Penelope (Susannah York) has acquired a college degree, worldly wisdom and two dreary suitors (George Grizzard and Don Murray).

Ryan fulminates against the inconstancy of women and the obsessive cowardice he sees sapping the strength of contemporary America. Penelope drops hints about "heroism and its sexual roots." Finally it is revealed that Ryan's breast-beating is a cover-up for persistent psychosexual anxiety. That is the sort of pop-psych insight that might make an acceptable reply from the agony columnist on a local paper. It emphatically does not do much to hold a play--or a movie--together.

What comes especially clear in Wanda June is that Vonnegut is an easy kind of satirist. His writing is full of engineered whimsy, empty of rage. He is so eager to ingratiate himself with his audience that he seldom takes on anything more substantial than tentative heroes, canting psychiatrists, fumbling representatives of Mencken's American booboisie. A couple of heavyweight opponents are indeed invoked throughout Wanda June (the war in Viet Nam, the Christian religion). But Vonnegut dances around them like a kid from the Golden Gloves unwilling to risk even a jab. . J.C.

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