Johnny Got His Gun

Dalton Trumbo, USA, 1971, 111 minutes

A virtually unknown director, Trumbo has been saved from oblivion due to the credits he received for the screenplay in Kubrick's Spartarus. A victim of the pogroms under the terrorist regime of McCarthy, Trumbo reinforces his anti-establishment feelings through the transfer onto the screen of his own anti-war novel "Johnny Got his Gun".

During WW I in a hospital somewhere in Europe, a horrifically mutilated soldier (Bottoms), left limbless and faceless from a shell explosion, and thought by the medical staff to be a "vegetable", comes to realize the situation he is in. In his desperate attempt to establish communication with the outer world - he isn't able to speak as he hasn't a mouth and he can't write since his arms were cut off - he falls back on a series of fantasies fusing myth and reality. He remembers his first and only night with his girlfriend, he enoounters a very pessimistic Christ (Donald Sutherland), and he recalls events with his father (Jason Robarts). And as the doctors arc immersed in their research for potential experiments on the "body", a young nurse seems to be the only person able to hear Johnny's inner, desperate cries...

Much of the film is based on a brilliantly organized series of flashbacks, shot in oolour, while the bleak reality Of Johnny's situation is perfectly conveyed through b&w. Trumbo has retained here all the anarchic elements present in the novel, attacking mercilessly science, religion and politics. It's not just a very acute, ofien uncompromising. portrayal of war away from the battlefields, but rather a fierce polemic on the irrationality of our whole cultural edifice. What is so appealing about Johnny Got his Gun is that it carefully avoids a lapse into sentimentality, entering an area of profound potential for huananitarianism often disturbed by the very pessimistic reality which social institutions impose on man. This paradoxical character of life where the individual existence is constantly truncated by narrow ideology achieves here its most palpable expression in a superb series of monologues by the mutilated Johnny. Trumbo's own escape from a narrow polemic culminates in one of the rare optimistic moments of the film where a priest displays beautifully the stupidity of the military establishment...

Often very poetic, this is not self-glorifying American melodrama. A subversive film, Johnny Got his Gun is not so much anti-war cinema, it's more an elegiac hymn to life.

Review by Spiros Gangas
Taken from EUFS Programme 1992-93