ShareThisAs long as wounded warriors return home from battle with damaged limbs and minds, Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" will never lose its relevance. First as a novel, then three decades later as a film and, this week, nearly four more decades later, as a DVD, "Johnny" remains one of America's most important artistic anti-war statements.
Written in 1938 and published in 1939 just as World War II was beginning in Europe, Trumbo's novel won the National Book Award for most original novel of the year. It tells the story of a young man, Joe Bonham, whose body is nearly destroyed from a shell in trench warfare during the last day of World War I. When Joe regains consciousness in a military hospital, his mind is relatively intact, but he can no longer see, hear or speak, and his arms and legs are gone. Yet he still has the ability to remember and to fantasize, and through the efforts of a nurse, learns to communicate by nodding his head in Morse code.
(Interestingly, once Germany invaded the Soviet Union and America was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor, both in 1941, Trumbo and his publisher agreed to keep his book out of print until the war was over.)
After years as one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters ("Kitty Foyle," "A Guy Named Joe," "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"), in 1947 Trumbo was blacklisted and imprisoned as one of the "Hollywood 10" for refusing to testify before a congressional committee about his radical views and membership in the Communist Party. But he continued to turn out screenplays using friends as "fronts," writing "Roman Holiday," among other successful films, and even winning an Oscar under the "Robert Rich" pseudonym for his screenplay for 1956's "The Brave One." He later helped break the blacklist when he received open credit for his screenplays for "Spartacus" and "Exodus," both released in 1960. He went on to write the screenplays for such films as "The Sandpiper," "Lonely Are the Brave," "The Fixer" and "Papillon."
Yet Trumbo always wanted to make a movie based on his most famous novel. Trumbo and his family moved to Mexico following his imprisonment, and there he met, in 1963, with famed film director Luis Bunuel (also an exile, in this case from Franco's Spain) about collaborating on "Johnny Got His Gun." But their partnership never worked out.
Seven years later, with the Vietnam War raging and Trumbo wanting to contribute to the anti-war movement, he decided to direct "Johnny" himself, using his own screenplay. The low-budget film, released in 1972, is now available for the first time on DVD (Shout! Factory, $19.99, rated PG), titled "Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun."
Trumbo's son Christopher, who served on "Johnny" as both associate producer and first assistant director, explains in the DVD documentary "Dalton Trumbo: Rebel in Hollywood" that the film was difficult to make due to the "non-cinematic" nature of the novel as a "work of the imagination." So they devised a methodology, with cinematographer Jules Brenner, to have the hospital scenes of Joe (played by the 18-year-old Timothy Bottoms) shot in black-and-white, with Joe's remembrances and fantasies shot in color.
Joe's memories are mostly about his home life before his enlistment in the Army. His fantasies are much wilder, from visions of playing cards on a military train with deceased soldiers and Jesus Christ (an appropriately beatific Donald Sutherland) to his being the star of a Felliniesque traveling road show, "Joe Bonham -- The Self Supporting Basket Case."
Although "Johnny Got His Gun" was not a financial success at the box office, it won three awards at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Jury Prize and the International Critics Prize. Soon after the film's release, Trumbo was diagnosed with lung cancer, the disease that eventually took his life in 1976.
Among the other DVD special features are a radio adaptation of Trumbo's novel from 1940 starring James Cagney, a new interview with Bottoms, some behind-the-scenes footage of the filming and a magazine article about the film from 1971.
Despite the limited budget available to Trumbo on this independent production, "Johnny" packs a powerful punch in its indictment of old men sending young men off to die and empathetic depiction of a suffering soldier.
Trumbo's script and Bottoms' performance make the helplessness and devastation of the injured Joe almost unbearable to watch -- and the film's PG rating inexplicable. Although a viewer can never genuinely feel the pain of a wounded soldier, the claustrophobia of Joe's condition is almost palpable. And "Johnny Got His Gun" remains timeless and unforgettable.
(brucedancis(at)comcast.net.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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