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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo directed just one film in his career, but it was a doozy: Johnny Got His Gun, Trumbo’s 1971 adaptation of his 1939 novel and a work that has long been considered one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever produced. Ironically, though, there’s very little war in it, and nothing in the way of blood and guts. Instead, what we get is the tortured tale of one Joe Bonham (Timothy Bottoms), a callow 18-year-old who goes off to World War I because he believes that fighting for his country is the right thing to do. But when an officer orders some men to leave their trench and bury a dead enemy soldier, Joe is hit by a mortar shell and left without arms, legs, or a face (he can’t see, hear, or speak). Doctors assume that his cognitive brain function is gone as well, but in fact he can still think, reason, and feel (figuratively and literally); as a result, he has been consigned to a life far worse than death. The film intermingles scenes of Joe in an Army hospital as he gradually comes to understand his circumstances (we never actually see him, as he’s covered by a mask and sheets) with the various flashbacks, memories, and hallucinations he experiences during that process. The former, during which Bottoms supplies Joe’s thoughts in voice-over, are in black & white; the latter, which range from childhood memories (Joe’s father is played by Jason Robards) to bizarre fantasies like playing cards with Jesus Christ (Donald Sutherland), are in color, bathed in a kind of dreamy glow that’s countered by a heavy and persistent sense of dread. To be sure, Johnny Got His Gun has its heavy-handed, pretentious moments. But this is a smart, disturbing, and somber film that stands out in a genre (i.e., war movies) that unfortunately is never irrelevant. An excellent batch of bonus features includes an hour-long profile of Trumbo (who was jailed for contempt of Congress during the Communist witch hunts of the ‘40s and ‘50s, then blacklisted by Hollywood), a new interview with Bottoms, a 1940 radio adaptation of the story (featuring James Cagney as Joe), and even the Metallica music video “One,” which features extensive footage from the film. --Sam Graham
Product Description
A young American soldier (Timothy Bottoms) is wounded by a mortar shell on the last day of World War I. He lies in a hospital bed as a quadruple amputee who has lost his arms, legs, eyes, ears, mouth and nose. He remains conscious and able to think, thereby reliving his life through strange dreams, memories and conversations with Jesus (Donald Sutherland), unable to distinguish whether he is awake or dreaming. Dalton Trumbo, author of the famous 1930s antiwar book Johnny Got His Gun wrote and directed this film adaptation. In 1947, he refused to testify before a congressional committee investigating alleged Communist infiltration of the film industry. Blacklisted for nearly a decade, he wrote numerous scripts under pseudonyms including Roman Holiday and Gun Crazy until he was finally credited for his work on Exodus and Spartacus in 1960.
Bonus Features:
* Includes a limited-edition reproduction of the film poster in-pack.
* Dalton Trumbo: Rebel In Hollywood (60 min. feature available for the first time in U.S.).
* Interview with star Timothy Bottoms.
* Behind-the-scenes footage with commentary by films DP, Jules Brenner & Timothy Bottoms.
* Original theatrical trailer.
* Metallica Music video for 'One', featuring footage from the film.
* 1940 Radio adaptation staring James Cagney.
Bonus Features:
* Includes a limited-edition reproduction of the film poster in-pack.
* Dalton Trumbo: Rebel In Hollywood (60 min. feature available for the first time in U.S.).
* Interview with star Timothy Bottoms.
* Behind-the-scenes footage with commentary by films DP, Jules Brenner & Timothy Bottoms.
* Original theatrical trailer.
* Metallica Music video for 'One', featuring footage from the film.
* 1940 Radio adaptation staring James Cagney.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
72 of 74 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
I haven't read the book, but I knew the basic plot outline and so when I saw this film, I expected very strong anti-war sentiments to be pervasive throughout the movie. However, even though the main character loses his arms, legs, face and four of his five senses to a mortar in World War I, not a drop of blood is shown in the movie and the film's indictment of the institution of war seems to take a backseat to the young soldier's struggle to adapt to his dark, silent and motionless environment.
I was hesitant to watch this film at first because I thought it would be dull to watch a two-hour movie concerning a horribly maimed young man lying in bed. However, due to his unique condition of being connected to this world only through his sense of touch, I found it fascinating how he first struggles to distinguish his dreams from his reality, and after that tries puts his energy toward discerning the passage of time.
The movie includes a number of dream sequences, which to a man deprived of sight, sound, smell and taste, must certainly at least rival anything that happens during his waking hours in importance. The numerous dream sequences serve to explain his past and shed light on his values. Some of them are quite surreal, some are unhappy while some are fairly humorous.
The ending is grim and the man's predicament is left unresolved, which leaves the viewer to fill in some of the blanks, but this invites the viewer to give the movie some thought after seeing it, and I by no means felt that the movie was left so open-ended that I felt like I had been shortchanged.
I strongly recommend this brilliant film even to those people who generally avoid war movies.
91 of 97 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
This is a significant film that has reached cult status. Dalton Trumbo wrote the novel in 1938, won the National Book Award, and then the book was banned as subversive. Trumbo suffered a polemic from HUAC in 1949, and spent a year in jail for contempt of congress. The book was banned again in 1950, during the Korean War. Kirk Douglas brought him out of exile in 1960 to write the screenplay for SPARTACUS. In 1970, Trumbo directed this film himself, adapted from his own book, and it emerged as a scathing anti-war allegory. When the film opened, it did poorly at the box office in America. The Viet Nam war had clouded the issue. Perhaps if he had included more humor and satire in the picture it would have been easier to digest. Watching it is like drinking white lightning; it burns all the way down.
In 1989, the rock group Metallica released a 7 minute video called TWO OF ONE, and it did use clips from this film. This helped to generate more interest in the movie. The cinematography was above average, done by Jules Brenner, nicely blending B&W, sepia, and full color scenes.
We are introduced in the opening scene to a group of doctors discussing a decerebrated patient, a grievously wounded soldier, assumed to be brain dead; incapable of sentience or dreams; just an armless, legless, faceless, totally deaf living chunk of meat with a beating heart and an active colon. But we soon hear the soldier's voice, and realize he is aware of his environment.
Timothy Bottoms, in his film debut, played the young soldier, Joe Bonham. He did an exceptional job with the voice over work, and we get to see him in the flesh in flashbacks; even the moment he crouched in the trenches, readying himself for his rendezvous with the howitzer shell that had his name on it. There were some rough spots in his acting, but overall he was fine as the fresh-faced naive Joe. Jason Robards played the father, and he underplayed brilliantly. He was a terrific actor, who could bray and strut like in A THOUSAND CLOWNS, or he could quietly inhabit a role like he did in this film. Kathy Fields did a credible job as Joe's sweetheart, Kareen. Charles McGraw was wonderfully gruff, yet compassionate at Kareen's Dad. Eduard Franz, a skilled character actor, played the pivotal role of General Tillery, the doctor that had spared Joe's life, such as it was. Donald Sutherland played Christ, looking every inch both the hippy and the savoir. His scenes gave us a humorous take on death and war. Trumbo should have paid more attention to this level of satire. It might have made this movie more popular to the audiences of 1971.
Diane Varsi was outstanding as the fourth Nurse. She found a way to share her love of humanity with what was left of Joe. Her willingness to see him as a human being, to open windows, to sponge bathe him, even masturbate him, showed a level of compassion unrivaled in the piece. It was she that figured out Joe's incessant head movements were important. They turned out to be Morse code. Joe found a way to commlunicate with his doctors.
He asked to be allowed to be around other people, even to be given over to a carnival if necessary. He was tired of being alone. If they would not do this, then they should kill him. It was a chilling scene indeed, when shame, guilt, and cowardice washed over the medical assemblage. They fled quickly, exiling Nurse Varsi from the room, turned their backs on him, leaving him alone and drugged in the darkness and the complete silence, in the hellish limbo of the land of the living dead.
I liked this film a lot, more for its message than its content. As TV Guide put it, the movie was,"flawed but powerful." This film has sturdy teeth, and it bites through much of the traditional dogma, propaganda, and lies that politicians force-feed us eternally. It teaches us that blind patriotism can lead us into dark events, whereby the powers that be will be able to manipulate or sacrifice our life or limb on the alter of their choosing. It teaches us further that freedom, liberty, and democracy can be reduced to buzz words that can mantle the real issues. We come to realize that, in fact, there are worse things in this world than death.
In 1989, the rock group Metallica released a 7 minute video called TWO OF ONE, and it did use clips from this film. This helped to generate more interest in the movie. The cinematography was above average, done by Jules Brenner, nicely blending B&W, sepia, and full color scenes.
We are introduced in the opening scene to a group of doctors discussing a decerebrated patient, a grievously wounded soldier, assumed to be brain dead; incapable of sentience or dreams; just an armless, legless, faceless, totally deaf living chunk of meat with a beating heart and an active colon. But we soon hear the soldier's voice, and realize he is aware of his environment.
Timothy Bottoms, in his film debut, played the young soldier, Joe Bonham. He did an exceptional job with the voice over work, and we get to see him in the flesh in flashbacks; even the moment he crouched in the trenches, readying himself for his rendezvous with the howitzer shell that had his name on it. There were some rough spots in his acting, but overall he was fine as the fresh-faced naive Joe. Jason Robards played the father, and he underplayed brilliantly. He was a terrific actor, who could bray and strut like in A THOUSAND CLOWNS, or he could quietly inhabit a role like he did in this film. Kathy Fields did a credible job as Joe's sweetheart, Kareen. Charles McGraw was wonderfully gruff, yet compassionate at Kareen's Dad. Eduard Franz, a skilled character actor, played the pivotal role of General Tillery, the doctor that had spared Joe's life, such as it was. Donald Sutherland played Christ, looking every inch both the hippy and the savoir. His scenes gave us a humorous take on death and war. Trumbo should have paid more attention to this level of satire. It might have made this movie more popular to the audiences of 1971.
Diane Varsi was outstanding as the fourth Nurse. She found a way to share her love of humanity with what was left of Joe. Her willingness to see him as a human being, to open windows, to sponge bathe him, even masturbate him, showed a level of compassion unrivaled in the piece. It was she that figured out Joe's incessant head movements were important. They turned out to be Morse code. Joe found a way to commlunicate with his doctors.
He asked to be allowed to be around other people, even to be given over to a carnival if necessary. He was tired of being alone. If they would not do this, then they should kill him. It was a chilling scene indeed, when shame, guilt, and cowardice washed over the medical assemblage. They fled quickly, exiling Nurse Varsi from the room, turned their backs on him, leaving him alone and drugged in the darkness and the complete silence, in the hellish limbo of the land of the living dead.
I liked this film a lot, more for its message than its content. As TV Guide put it, the movie was,"flawed but powerful." This film has sturdy teeth, and it bites through much of the traditional dogma, propaganda, and lies that politicians force-feed us eternally. It teaches us that blind patriotism can lead us into dark events, whereby the powers that be will be able to manipulate or sacrifice our life or limb on the alter of their choosing. It teaches us further that freedom, liberty, and democracy can be reduced to buzz words that can mantle the real issues. We come to realize that, in fact, there are worse things in this world than death.
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful
By James Morris
Format:DVD
In 1971 I was 17, and a budding "hippie" with anti-war leanings and a rebel streak a mile long. While riding the NYC subway to work one day, I noticed a young man about my age absorbed in a book as he rode next to me. The title of the book was Johnny Got His Gun. "Probably some right-wing adolescent shoot-`em-up war epic", I thought to myself, dismissing the teen and his book from my mind. A few weeks later, I read an article in the newspaper that a film was being made of the book Johnny Got His Gun, and I was instantly embarrassed at my previous assumption of the book's subject matter when I read that Johnny Got His Gun was actually a pacifist anti-war classic, and that its author, Dalton Trumbo, had been blacklisted as a communist during the 1950's. A few days later, I ran across the book in my favorite bookstore, and picked it up almost without thinking.
I was immediately blown away by the intense imagery of the narrative's storyline. Joe Bonham, an 18-year old soldier, is hit by a bombshell on the last day of WWI, and awakes in a hospital bed horribly deformed. Unable to speak, see, hear, or smell, he gradually learns that his arms and legs have been amputated. As the horror of his situation unfolds in a stream-of-consciousness first person narrative, he slowly realizes that the bomb shell that hit him scooped out his face, leaving a gaping hole where his eyes, ears, nose and mouth used to be. The army doctors automatically assume he is a thoughtless vegetable, and in an experimental effort to see if they can keep someone in his condition alive, he spends the next several years in a hospital bed, well cared-for but practically forgotten. Joe is constantly thinking but unable to communicate. Deprived of all senses, except feelings and thoughts, his story movingly unfolds, and I was forever transformed by the beauty of Mr. Trumbo's story-telling ability and the terror-filled description of Joe's situation. He spends his days remembering the details of his young life, while struggling to overcome the inability to discern his conscious thoughts from his nightmares. As I waited for the film's premiere, I must have read and re-read the book a half dozen times, and 38 years later, portions of the powerful book still stick with me.
I saw the film on opening day in an art house on the east side of Manhattan, and although I was slightly disappointed by the movie's inability to project the author's hauntingly beautiful prose onto the screen, the story has remained a favorite of mine ever since. I recall that the film got lukewarm reviews, but I remember urging all of my friends to see it and experience it for themselves. I also remember a review by Rex Reed, then one of the top film critics in NY. In describing the scene where Joe finally manages to communicate with a nurse the fact that he has conscious thoughts, Mr. Reed said that that scene alone contained more tenderness than the entire film "Love Story" (which was then a current smash hit). I was also bitterly disappointed that the film did not get more attention.
Recently I learned that an all-region DVD of the film was available from Portugal, and I gladly paid Amazon the import price of the DVD. I also obtained a new copy of the book, and found to my delight that the story had lost none of its impact after 38 years. Why should it? The book was first published in 1939, and when I first discovered it 32 years later, I found it fresh, vibrant and surprisingly topical.
Apparently due the fact that a stage version (and a DVD of the stage version) is getting quite a bit of attention, the powers that be have finally decided to release this forgotten gem. I will now order the new DVD as well.
Although the film is slightly dated, I heartily recommend it for its unforgettable storyline. I also recommend that anyone who enjoys it check out the novel; Mr. Trumbo's masterpiece is every bit as compelling as any film version could ever be.
I was immediately blown away by the intense imagery of the narrative's storyline. Joe Bonham, an 18-year old soldier, is hit by a bombshell on the last day of WWI, and awakes in a hospital bed horribly deformed. Unable to speak, see, hear, or smell, he gradually learns that his arms and legs have been amputated. As the horror of his situation unfolds in a stream-of-consciousness first person narrative, he slowly realizes that the bomb shell that hit him scooped out his face, leaving a gaping hole where his eyes, ears, nose and mouth used to be. The army doctors automatically assume he is a thoughtless vegetable, and in an experimental effort to see if they can keep someone in his condition alive, he spends the next several years in a hospital bed, well cared-for but practically forgotten. Joe is constantly thinking but unable to communicate. Deprived of all senses, except feelings and thoughts, his story movingly unfolds, and I was forever transformed by the beauty of Mr. Trumbo's story-telling ability and the terror-filled description of Joe's situation. He spends his days remembering the details of his young life, while struggling to overcome the inability to discern his conscious thoughts from his nightmares. As I waited for the film's premiere, I must have read and re-read the book a half dozen times, and 38 years later, portions of the powerful book still stick with me.
I saw the film on opening day in an art house on the east side of Manhattan, and although I was slightly disappointed by the movie's inability to project the author's hauntingly beautiful prose onto the screen, the story has remained a favorite of mine ever since. I recall that the film got lukewarm reviews, but I remember urging all of my friends to see it and experience it for themselves. I also remember a review by Rex Reed, then one of the top film critics in NY. In describing the scene where Joe finally manages to communicate with a nurse the fact that he has conscious thoughts, Mr. Reed said that that scene alone contained more tenderness than the entire film "Love Story" (which was then a current smash hit). I was also bitterly disappointed that the film did not get more attention.
Recently I learned that an all-region DVD of the film was available from Portugal, and I gladly paid Amazon the import price of the DVD. I also obtained a new copy of the book, and found to my delight that the story had lost none of its impact after 38 years. Why should it? The book was first published in 1939, and when I first discovered it 32 years later, I found it fresh, vibrant and surprisingly topical.
Apparently due the fact that a stage version (and a DVD of the stage version) is getting quite a bit of attention, the powers that be have finally decided to release this forgotten gem. I will now order the new DVD as well.
Although the film is slightly dated, I heartily recommend it for its unforgettable storyline. I also recommend that anyone who enjoys it check out the novel; Mr. Trumbo's masterpiece is every bit as compelling as any film version could ever be.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent anti-war film
Dalton Trumbo's war film tells the tragic story of Joe (Timothy Bottoms) who is nearly killed fighting in the First World War. Read more
Published 3 hours ago by D Brown
4.0 out of 5 stars
Could have been a horror story with few changes
This will capture your attention and refuse to let go even after the movie is over. Wickedly macabre and filled with implied and explicit cruelty, this film will startle,... Read more
Published 1 month ago by MABOK
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is what war does
I loved this movie that depicts the results of ANY war. Every American should watch this.Timothy Bottoms has never made a bad movie.
Published 2 months ago by vicki
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gloomy film
This is a story from World War 1, filmed in the fifties. The story is about a young soldier who got severely injured, and how he is trying to solve his situation at the hospital. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Torunn Bjreid
4.0 out of 5 stars
painful to concieve the truth
a good dark movie that you struggle with throughout to get on the same page as this poor fella! good flashbacks and acting..
Published 2 months ago by Loren Lyons
5.0 out of 5 stars
Patriotism ?
Awesome movie, it is a wake up for those who believe in this patriotism nonsense, or maybe not?, your mind is already been brainwashed.
Published 3 months ago by Vasil Abyss
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good movie
I first saw this movie in the early 70's. I enjoyed it then, and now I have it in my collection.
Thanks
Thanks
Published 3 months ago by Nelson Steisslinger
4.0 out of 5 stars
Love it but am I mistaken
I just watched this on my Kindle - which I love being able to do. It's a moving movie and my heart hurts every time I watch it. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Jennifer
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jeanna Gets Her Gun
An amazingly tragic story that continues to be relevant from generation to generation. And as females enter the combat arena it will be tragically and exponentially so.
Published 4 months ago by Enrique Castillo
5.0 out of 5 stars
My favorite!
This is a must have to any collection. Raw and gives you a glimpse as to what a soldier faces in the ugliness of war. Read more
Published 5 months ago by nicole diliberto
