Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

Dalton Trumbo is chiefly remembered as a very talented, awarded winning screenwriter who was blacklisted during Joseph McCarthy's crusade, continued to write (and win Oscars) under pseudonyms, and eventually broke the blacklist in the early 60's allowing his name to once again appear on his work. They even made a really good movie about him called Trumbo which earned star Bryan Cranston an Oscar nomination. Before all that however Dalton wrote for magazines and was a novelist in the 1930's. His 1938 novel Johnny Got His Gun won the National Book Award in 1939, it was an anti war novel, very much in sentiment with the post Great War feelings. The novel was so structurally unique, and tonally grim that adapting it to a feature film would have been basically impossible during the studio system era. More then 30 years after the novels release Trumbo would adapt and direct (his own directing credit) his own novel as a movie.

The film stars Timothy Bottoms, in his screen debut, as Joe Bonham, an 18 year old American solder in the first World War who loses all of his limbs and has his face blown off on the battlefield. Somehow Joe's body is recovered, and thinking him brain dead the military elects to keep pvt Bonham (he is so badly mangled the army is unable to identify him) alive as an experiment, to test the durability of various life support methods to aid in medical research and hopefully save more lives in the future. However the doctors are mistaken, Joe is not brain dead, in fact he is perfectly aware mentally, when not sufficiently drugged, however he has no means by which to communicate with the outside world. The scenes in the outside world are rendered in black and white, while Joe's interior life of dreams, memories and fantasies are played out in color.

This is one of the darkest most depressing films I have ever seen, it was a rough watch. Joe's life is a living hell, as anti war statement this is immensely effective stuff. That Trumbo was able to pull this all together and make a harrowing, and ironically visually interesting motion picture is another testament to his great talents. Absolutely not for everybody Johnny Got His Gun is still a dense, rich achievement, I know there was a lot here I didn't catch and I intend to return the film, but I think I'm going to wait at least a year to do so. ****