With credits including Kitty Foyle (1940), Bill of Divorcement (1940), Roman Holiday (1953), (using the name of Ian McLellan Hunter as a front) and Spartacus (1960), Dalton Trumbo is considered by many one of the best screenwriters to ever work in Hollywood. Dalton Trumbo is also widely remembered as being part of the “Hollywood Ten,” a group of film professionals who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 during the committee’s investigation of Communist influences in the motion picture industry. Many of those individuals were subsequently jailed for several months (including Trumbo) and blacklisted from Hollywood. Because he was so gifted, Trumbo was always able to find screenwriting work. However, other writer’s names were put on the film credits. It wasn’t until 1960, when both Exodus and Spartacus reached theaters, that Trumbo was properly credited as the screenwriter, after more than a decade of using a front.
Trumbo was also a novelist. Published in 1939, Trumbo had been inspired to write Johnny Got His Gun after reading an article in the newspaper about the Prince of Wales’ visit to a Canadian veteran’s hospital to see a soldier who had lost all of his senses and his limbs. Though the subsequent 1971 film is fervently anti-war, first time director Dalton Trumbo crafted a series of harrowing images that are bound to be burned in the viewer’s memory, no matter where they stand on the war issue.
After years of working and reworking on the screenplay, Trumbo was finally ready to make a theatrical version of Johnny Got His Gun. The film concentrates on the horrors of war on a very individual and personal level. Timothy Bottoms (in his screen debut) plays Joe Bonham, a WWI soldier horribly maimed during the days of his service. He loses all his limbs, his sight, hearing, taste, smell and speech. He becomes, in essence, a piece of living, breathing and thinking meat. The doctors and nurses attending to Joe assume he’s in a kind of vegetative state; with little or no brain activity. Oh, how wrong they are. Joe is completely aware of what’s going on around him (quite understandably, he’s confused about the different things medical personnel are doing to him at first) but he’s unable to express any of his concerns. Joe is a prisoner in his own body and the few people, who see him, don’t realize he’s in there. He has a hard time distinguishing between his awake and dreaming states, because he’s continually being pumped full of morphine.
Though Johnny was Trumbo’s only foray into directing, he shows he had a real feel for the camera. Transferring what is essentially a first-person narrative, told by Joe’s inner point of view is no easy task. Since he spends the entire film motionless in a hospital bed, Trumbo had to come up with a captivating way to tell Joe’s story. He did this by opening the film with a “point of view” shot taken from Joe’s bed perspective, as three doctor’s loom menacingly over his shattered body. The rest of the film wavers between a more typical third-person omniscience while anchoring the film in Joe’s consciousness through an omnipresent voiceover. Further, Trumbo differentiates between Joe’s different existences; his horrifying “real” world is rendered in razor sharp black and white, while his memories and hallucinations are in color, with both assuming a gauzy, soft focus ambience at times.Trumbo clearly didn’t want audiences to feel comfortable or neutral about Joe’s plight; his camera remains focused on Johnny’s crudely bandaged face for an uncomfortably long time, forcing us to gaze upon the horror that society has created.
Johnny Got His Gun is blessed with equally stunning performances. Bottoms, fresh out of high school during filming, conveys the innocence of youth, particularly in the memory and fantasy sequences. Playing Bottoms’ parents are the redoubtable Jason Robards and the lovely Marsha Hunt (herself, blacklisted). Robards does his usual splendid work evoking one of those great middle American men of the earth he was always able to portray so forcefully. Hunt and Robards are both unforgettable in one of the final fantasy sequences when Joe, finally aware of his real state, imagines he’s on display in a sort of surreal, Felliniesque circus. Also appearing is Donald Sutherland as Christ in a couple of hallucinatory segments. Sutherland does remarkably understated work that contains incredible emotional gravitas. There’s one especially stunning image of Sutherland culled from what was originally a Trumbo-Luis Bunuel collaboration on bringing the film version to the screen. Jesus shepherds Joe, along with several actually deceased vets (as opposed to Joe’s living death), onto a train to transport them to the afterworld, and a graceful tracking shot has Sutherland, white robes and scarves flowing behind him, leaning out of the conductor’s cabin on a moonless night. Amazing stuff.
Upon its release in 1971, with the Vietnam War raging, Johnny Got His Gun was seen as a strong anti-war film. While some may have and still see it that way, Dalton Trumbo claimed the film was not an anti-war film, but rather a journey into Joe’s mind following his injuries. Whether you ultimately agree with that assessment or not, Johnny Got His Gun is a harrowing tale of living life on the edge of death, that is bound to affect everyone who sees it.
There are more than a few problems with the source elements utilized in this enhanced 1.78:1 transfer. My sense is that most of these were probably part of the original film, including sloppy edit splices and the occasional wobbliness of image. Overall, the contrast and clarity in the black and white segments is solid with good saturation. There seems to be intentional gauziness and softness, in the color segments.
The DD 2.0 soundtrack sports excellent fidelity. This isn’t a showy sound world to begin with, but what’s here is clear and crisp, with dialogue easy to hear and the omnipresent paradiddles of Fielding’s underscore cutting through with snap and crackle. The film is closed captioned.
Several excellent extras augment this DVD, chief among them a nice 2006 retrospective on Trumbo (over 90 minutes long) featuring Trumbo’s son Christopher, Marsha Hunt, and Jules Brenner, among others. Also offered are a more recent interview with Bottoms, some behind the scenes footage of Trumbo directing with Bottoms and Brenner providing commentary, the 1940 radio adaptation with Cagney, an American Cinematographer article on the film from 1971, and the original trailer. Also included is Metallica’s music video for “One,” a video which used extensive clips from the film and introduced it to a new generation of viewers. One interesting note: After much effort to attempt to gain rights to the film’s clips, Metallica bought the entire film outright to use the clips.
Check out a clip from *Johnny Got His Gun* below:
