Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

This wrenching tale about a basket case in which a young American soldier named Johnny -Timothy Bottoms - is hit by a bomb on the last days of the WWI . The story takes place in the mind of a quadruple amputee who has also lost his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. As the deaf and dumb Joe is limbless , faceless and confined to a semi-existence and he attempts to communicate with the staff -Edward Franz- and caretakers . Regaining consciousness, 20 and some year-old Joe Bonham slowly learns that while his brain is healthy and able to reason, the rest of his body is irreparably shattered, leaving him forever tied within the confines of his own imagination. Regarded as a vegetable and stuck in a light-less hospital utility room , he fantasizes and dreams about life before and after the artillery shell . He struggles valiantly to find some way to communicate with the outside world . Tapping his head on the pillow in Morse code he breaks through and pleads with his nurse -Diane Varsi- to be put on display as a living example of the cost of war.

The black-listed Trumbo adapted his own novel, seemingly unfilmable , incredibly based on real events , approximately thirty years after he wrote it and shot at the climax of the Vietnam era . The picture is often sentimental, sometimes thought-provoking as well as terrifying . It is developed through a sustained interior monologue on a series of flashbacks to Johnny's infancy , his first and only night with his love interest -performed by Kathy Fields- , before leaving for the front , his employment in the local bakery and his relationship to his father- Jason Robards- and Christ well played by Donad Sutherland , including some breathtaking images in a train. The flick terminates captioning the following : ¨ War dead since 1914 : over 80.000.000 , missing or mutilated : over 150.000.000¨ . ¨ Dulce et decorum est pro Patria Mori ¨. The movie deservedly won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes 71 . This morbid anti-war and pro-euthanasia diatribe is very good film though a little bit boring , talky and depressing. It's recently remade (2008) in a special version by Rowan Joseph with Ben MacKenzie as Johnny .

Fmovies: Vietnam determinedly enlightens Dalton Trumbo's repossession of old ground in the era of MASH and Catch-22. Trumbo's Johnny is, yes indeed, a guy named Joe, once a baker supporting his family, smitten with gentle Teresa Wright or Greer Garson-style girl, who joins the army because, why, "it's the sort of thing a fella oughta do, when his country is in trouble." All these familial figures are in essence Norman Rockwell collectibles. What a contrast when, in the trenches, he's sent on a round to hide a carcass that affronts a colonel's sense of smell. A shell lands near him. This is his last memory before he, regrettably, awoke, in a hospital.

The army is satisfied he has no cognizant mind. They resolve to keep him breathing only to study him. But he's cognizant all right, and little by little he becomes so of the horror of his wounds. He's literally captive within his mind, for a desperate eternity to anyone with no available concept of time, until he discovers a way of communicating with a compassionate nurse. Trumbo avails himself of a brilliant fast-cutting sequence, in a sense the sort one frequently sees in edgy late '60s and early '70s movies, but a particularly incisive and acute portrayal of mental disorientation, Bottoms struggling to organize his new life's routine without the aid of any physical outlet, no anchor for his thoughts, struggling to file them with constant bewildering disturbances and loss of bearings. Even telling day from night is a mystery for him to solve.

The upsetting premise benefits from Paths of Glory, La Jetée and the story of Helen Keller, but in no way does he tell his story in anything but the most inimitable way. Never before or since this film have we seen anything much like it. Because of Trumbo's determination to render the most exacting possible depiction of Bottoms' unique perception, there is even a transitional effect unique to this film, a fade to yellow when he feels the sun for the first time since his injuries. This truly unique work also unearths probably the most inventive use of voice-over I might've ever heard: He describes people we see as vibrations. When two nurses enter, he claims that now there are two vibrations. In a clever smidgen of much-needed levity, one nurse is fat, and he supposes it's a man.

A story that authentically imparts the loneliest possible consciousness, one where the subject can't even be sure whether or not he's alive, Trumbo draws on flashbacks and flights of a deserted, despairing imagination to make Joe alive for us, as he subsists in a living death. Evincing what could perhaps be argued as a level of bitterness in respect to the filming of Trumbo's human war tales in the past, or simply a yearning for the naivete of the old days, some memories and fantasies recreate the 1940s melodrama use of music, soft lens, close-ups and prosy dialogue. Then we find some of the brutal realities of real-life scenes are muted by some of that classic technique after awhile as well. The most pleasant flashback is the first, when Joe and his girl kiss in her living room and are cut short by her father, who sends them to her room, where there's a love scene of such softness and splendor that its resonance ring through the whole film. Representing Trumbo's own awe at his character is Donald Sutherland's Jesus, who counsels Joe in a celestial milieu more akin to how Trumbo might've truly wanted to portray the same fantasy in A Guy Named Joe over thirty year

Just watch it. Pacifist for life. Nothing will ever change me after this. The most horrifying experience ever. Dalton Trumbo made this possibly the greatest book to film creation of all time. People who love war are simply not human, and this movie shows it perfectly. The acting is normal, and it should be. Johnny is a normal man, as all men who fight for the machine. The human condition has never been portrayed as real as this. I now see why trumbo was named one of the Hollywood 10. He was not a genius. He was a messenger with a gift for seeing reality.

Watch this film.

NOW!

Johnny Got His Gun fmovies. In America,this film is underrated.In my native France,it's praised by intellectuals,and it's part of what we call "ciné-club movies".In high school,this very year,my son studied passages from the book as well as scenes from the movie. Trumbo's movie might be the strongest condemnation of war that had ever been filmed.Using two colors -and even three-,toying with present and past (could we speak seriously of future?),he makes the dream of such great predecessors as Jean Renoir (la grande illusion) come true:War is impossible,because how can a wise race could tolerate such an horror? Three colors indeed: -the bleak black and white in the hospital,where asceticism rivals the best of Robert Bresson. -the luminous,radiant scenes of Johnny's past,old forties and fifties color are constantly in evidence in those memories that recall Wyler's or Ford's heyday. -the dark and threatening color that envelops the nightmares in the ruins where Johnny tries to catch up with his only love. Johnny is helpless, his loneliness is more frightening than you'll ever experiment.God can't hear you call.The merciful Jesus of Sunday school whom Johnny's mother taught him to fear and to trust has disappeared with Donald Sutherland on a runaway train.Now it's a deaf and dumb Greek divinity -check the shots of the surrealistic nightmare-,who repeats in your suffering body,in your tormented soul ,in your mind on fire,that you cannot escape your inhumane fate. The nurse provides solace for a while.She tries to communicate with him .She believes in the dignity of man,be he a peace of flesh.It encompasses masturbation as well as simply saying "merry Xmas!"But for all the others,particularly for the officer,he's someone (something?)you must hide ,you must gag,because his world has gotten no place for a human being who represents such a slur on his pride and his glory. Johnny got a raw deal....

...since a film has actually moved me quite like this. I had read about half of Dalton Trumbo's original novel before seeing the film. The book is sort of difficult to read, but the movie is one big revelation. It may be because Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for it and directed his own original brainchild that this film is so incredibly dense and gripping.

Much has been said about the plot and storyline, so I won't get on that here. The bottom line is, this movie is as original and authentic today as in 1971 when it was made (Vietnam war era, no less!), or even as in 1939 (at the eve of WW II!), the year the novel first appeared on bookshelves. A timeless classic if there ever was one, and a glowing testimony to the eternal insanity of war. Oftentimes subtle and subversive, its dialogs fully expose the madness of the whole concept of it. But it doesn't stop there, the film also examines the conflict between religion and war and the absurdity that ensues from justifying bloodshed through creed.

I could go on forever trying to explain here why this movie is such a masterpiece to me, but maybe it's enough to tell whoever will read this to go buy the DVD. Like I said, it's a timeless anti-war classic that's worth every cent.

Johnny Got His Gun is a motion picture based on a 1938 anti-war book that used World War I as the setting. It should be noted that Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976), author of the book and director of the movie was a brilliant Hollywood screenwriter who also wrote the scripts for several Academy Award winning movies such as Exodus, Roman Holiday, Spartacus and The Brave One. He was one of the big 10 blacklisted in the 1940s by Hollywood and essentially forced to move to Mexico. He had joined the Communist party in 1943, thinking that it was all about caring for fellow human beings and ensuring that working people are paid fairly rather than being turned into semi-slaves. He was not terribly interested in the political agenda of the American Communist Party and dropped it in the mid 1940s to instead put his efforts into unionization. However, during the McCarthy era, the fact that he really had little to do with communism didn't matter. He was targeted by McCarthy, and imprisoned for a year for standing on his 5th Amendment rights by refusing to testify before McCarthy's committee. One must wonder if this book had something to do with why he was targeted in that immediate post WWII, rabidly pro-war and anti-communist culture.

This film is graced by several stars and minor players who were relative unknowns in 1971 when the film was released. They included not only Southerland, but also Timothy Bottoms, Tom Tryon, and David Soul. Additionally, some pretty well known actors such as Alice Nunn, Marsha Hunt, and Jason Robards had parts in the film. These excellent actors brought their considerable skills to what was essentially a low-budget anti-war film made and released during the Vietnam war. Strangely (at least to me), the movie wasn't a hit with the anti-war crowd during the very early 1970s--perhaps because the depiction of the terrible injuries suffered by the protagonist were just too real to those threatened with being drafted.

This is clearly an anti-war film because it shows the horror of war in the person of Johnny Bonham, a soldier whose body was blown apart by an explosive. All Johnny was left with was a horribly damaged body--essentially just a head and torso. He was left with none of the physical senses humans use to communicating with other people no eyes, ears or tongue. In the normal course of events, doctors would have let him die of his horrific injuries. However, in this case they used him as an experiment to see how well/long they could keep an essentially "dead" body alive. The doctors assumed his injuries were such that he had no consciousness and no ability to suffer. How wrong they were! In a surrealistic format, the film goes back and forth from a black and white present, to a color past showing Johnny's memories, and back to the present in which Johnny has discussions with Jesus Christ (played by a young Donald Southerland).

To this viewer, it was the beauty of human compassion demonstrated first by a nurse supervisor and later by the young nurse who cared for Johnny that resonated. When we first see Johnny as a patient, he is "stored" in what looks like some kind of utility room, with no light, no air, and no human contact other than the minimum necessary to provide physical care. The nursing supervisor (sort of a battle-Axel type) comes in and demands that the window be opened so he can have the light and sun on his face and some fresh air. When the other nurses start to protest that he won't feel these things, she shuts them up with a words to the ef