User reviews

I saw this movie on public Greek TV (original version with subtitles), and was glued to the screen until the very end. I would say that it develops in three modes. One is the horrible black and white present, one is the colorful past (memory) and one is the surreal world of Johnny's dreams where he is conscious of his injury! I haven't understood how the scenes with his father in the past add up to the movie very well. The acting isn't superb and some lines could have been different. The black and white cinematography is very convincing and the scenes with the last nurse are tremendous! Aside from the downsides of war which are evident, the movie also deals with how the system is willing to suppress its own fabricated heroes when they fall short of its ideology. One of the best Hollywood movies ever made, chiefly due to its powerful script. 8/10

A quadriplegic, who also lost most of his face from a WW1 bomb during that conflict, leaves us under no illusion of the futility of war and the insanity of those who lead us into them. As impacting a film as you're ever likely to see.

I became an instant pacifist when I saw this movie at the age of 16. Prior to this, I had been a supporter of the war in Vietnam, and had fully intended to enlist when I was old enough. My father, a veteran of WW2 and Korea, took me to see this movie when it was first released, to help cure me of my delusion about the glory of war. He was very successful in that undertaking. While I haven't seen the movie in 34 years, I cannot deny it had a major influence on my life. I'll never forget the horror I felt in seeing that poor soldier trapped in his mind. I would strongly recommend telling anyone who is pro-war to see this movie. You may help turn on others to the horrors of war.

Let me say that I would NOT recommend this to anyone lightly. I feel quite confident saying that there are very few people I know who I think should see it.

It's all about the horror of war. The setting is WWI and involves a very young man, boy really, who has no appendages because of a grenade. The rest of the moving cuts between his horrific vegetative physical state with voice-overs of his thoughts and flashbacks to his rather limited life experiences and a few fantasies or inner monologues.

This was really a soul-shattering movie in a lot of ways. After watching it I couldn't get it out of my head for hours after hours. I couldn't' get to sleep until mid way through the next day. It is just relentlessly brutal in giving detail of true internal psychological torture, seeing a wasted life sacrificed.

I didn't read the book, which I've been told is even more dramatic than the film. I honestly can't imagine that. I don't think I could read the book. Parts of it make me think of "All Quiet on the Western Front" but in far more isolated ways. There's no glory here.

Donald Sutherland's Christ is a fascinating character and compelling. Joe's flashbacks are all meaningful and relate to the "big questions" he's trying to sort out that only seem to provide answer that torture him even more. The scene with his girlfriend early in the movie when the old man says "don't make a whore out of her" is profound in its delivery.

It is fairly artistic in a very dark sense. It's too heavy for some people. They will claim it was boring but that is only for those who have no understanding of the weight of the matters because it doesn't involve them. Make no mistake, this sort of thing goes on every day as there are wars every day.

I'm all about defending and fighting for personal rights, but if this movie were shown in every public school in the world there would be far fewer people willing to fight for the causes of others and the promise of a few more dollars.

I've never seen a movie that moved me so much but in such a sad way. It was perfect in its execution, but then again some lessons are better left unlearned.

Johnny Got His Gun is a motion picture based on a 1938 anti-war book that used World War I as the setting. It should be noted that Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976), author of the book and director of the movie was a brilliant Hollywood screenwriter who also wrote the scripts for several Academy Award winning movies such as Exodus, Roman Holiday, Spartacus and The Brave One. He was one of the big 10 blacklisted in the 1940s by Hollywood and essentially forced to move to Mexico. He had joined the Communist party in 1943, thinking that it was all about caring for fellow human beings and ensuring that working people are paid fairly rather than being turned into semi-slaves. He was not terribly interested in the political agenda of the American Communist Party and dropped it in the mid 1940s to instead put his efforts into unionization. However, during the McCarthy era, the fact that he really had little to do with communism didn't matter. He was targeted by McCarthy, and imprisoned for a year for standing on his 5th Amendment rights by refusing to testify before McCarthy's committee. One must wonder if this book had something to do with why he was targeted in that immediate post WWII, rabidly pro-war and anti-communist culture.

This film is graced by several stars and minor players who were relative unknowns in 1971 when the film was released. They included not only Southerland, but also Timothy Bottoms, Tom Tryon, and David Soul. Additionally, some pretty well known actors such as Alice Nunn, Marsha Hunt, and Jason Robards had parts in the film. These excellent actors brought their considerable skills to what was essentially a low-budget anti-war film made and released during the Vietnam war. Strangely (at least to me), the movie wasn't a hit with the anti-war crowd during the very early 1970s--perhaps because the depiction of the terrible injuries suffered by the protagonist were just too real to those threatened with being drafted.

This is clearly an anti-war film because it shows the horror of war in the person of Johnny Bonham, a soldier whose body was blown apart by an explosive. All Johnny was left with was a horribly damaged body--essentially just a head and torso. He was left with none of the physical senses humans use to communicating with other people no eyes, ears or tongue. In the normal course of events, doctors would have let him die of his horrific injuries. However, in this case they used him as an experiment to see how well/long they could keep an essentially "dead" body alive. The doctors assumed his injuries were such that he had no consciousness and no ability to suffer. How wrong they were! In a surrealistic format, the film goes back and forth from a black and white present, to a color past showing Johnny's memories, and back to the present in which Johnny has discussions with Jesus Christ (played by a young Donald Southerland).

To this viewer, it was the beauty of human compassion demonstrated first by a nurse supervisor and later by the young nurse who cared for Johnny that resonated. When we first see Johnny as a patient, he is "stored" in what looks like some kind of utility room, with no light, no air, and no human contact other than the minimum necessary to provide physical care. The nursing supervisor (sort of a battle-Axel type) comes in and demands that the window be opened so he can have the light and sun on his face and some fresh air. When the other nurses start to protest that he won't feel these things, she shuts them up with a words to the effect that she would not stand for treating any patient with less than excellent nursing care. (Being a nurse myself, I recognized immediately the nursing standards she was demanding although her words would probably not be understood in that context by a non-nurse). That brusk nurse supervisor's demand that even this terribly disabled person be treated with respect and concern was a tiny, but powerful scene in the movie, because it communicated the essential worth of all people, no matter their station or condition.

Later young nurse gives Johnny sensitive and kind care to, even though she has no idea that he has any mental awareness. The brilliance of her caring for even this, the least of patients, shows what human beneficence should be in this world. And it showed especially what being a nurse should mean. To me, the many shades and colors of human feeling for other people, and the importance of human caring--even under the most drastic of circumstances, was a key element of this film. To that extent, the message of about how humans should and should not view and interact with each other was even more powerful than the anti-war message.

I would recommend that anyone who can see this film treat themselves to a truly amazing experience. I've only seen it twice, and saw much more in the film the second time than I saw the first time. My guess is that if I obtain the DVD and see it several more times, additional layers of meaning will emerge. The film is that deep and that complex in its many forms and shades of meaning.

One of cinema's greatest achievements. The film is an incredible experience. The fact that you spend almost two hours watching the figure of someone buried under sheets and that we are intrigued by every second of it, testifies to the genius of the film. It's sad that most people remember this movie as the one Metallica made a video for. No offense to the band, but this JGHG is far more important than that. Dalton Trumbo's only directorial effort and it is flawless. The majority of the film is told in a voiceover and like "Twelve Angry Men" every thing takes place in one room. Prepare to be amazed.

This is the most disturbing movie I've ever seen. Beyond a doubt, the reason it is so obscure has nothing to do with its quality or relevance, but with the fact that it is too penetrating for the majority to handle. This is the cinematic equivalent of a punch in the face or a kick in the stomach. When I was about 12 or 13 I first saw the Metallica video "One", and I couldn't stop obsessing about it for days because it upset me so much. Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity will be knocked off their feet by this film. We watch a naive, well to do young man go to a war he doesn't understand in the slightest, and we also watch while he is brutally destroyed by a bomb. Trumbo has no pretensions to optimism or happy endings or anything of the kind; this healthy young man is turned into a pathetic, hideous hunk of flesh by a three second explosion that simply happened to occur, with no logic or reason to it. We hear his almost unendurable cries for his mother and his frantic desire to die as he realizes what he has been reduced to, a formless mass of flesh with no capacity for communication or real awareness left, and certainly no ability to enjoy anything. This is the first and only movie that has made me want to cry or leave the room in a hurry, and I've been a horror movie buff since age 11. This remorselessly tears right into the viewer not for the sake of tearing, but to prove a point. Just imagining yourself in this young man's position is enough to sink you into a fearful depression. Trumbo is outraged that we let this kind of thing occur at all any under circumstance, for whatever reason, and understandably shoves our faces into the real results of our passivity and complacency, shattering all our ridiculous fictions about the 'glory' or 'honor' of war. I think this should be required reading in high school, although extrasensitive people with depressive or morbid tendencies (like myself)should probably keep clear of it while still being strongly warned off the military or involvement in any kind of war. To me Dalton Trumbo epitomizes the genuinely anti establishment individual,not wanting to appear angry or discontented because it is stylish or in vogue, but being angry and discontented because unlike the rest of us he knows the true state of things and how deceptive our happy go lucky society really is. There are scenes in this movie that will be stamped on my psyche forever, and unpleasantly stamped at that. It is beyond my comprehension that any of the reviewers on this page could find this movie to be 'disappointing' or mediocre or whatever. I feel really bad for anyone who comes away from this movie without feeling anything. They should seriously cut themselves to see if they are robots or something. As you might have guessed, I am recommending it but at the same time warn anyone who watches that they will not be able to forget it or feel light hearted for a good chunk of time after viewing this film.

Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

I was devastated by the book, in the early 1970s, and yet this movie feels forced and a little cheesy. But this is purely because of how it was made, not for the story, which is terrifying both for the idea at its core, and for the way they carry it through.

There might be some problems with the logic of what to show and from whose point of view. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is easily a way to approach this problem a little differently. Dalton Trumbo, the director and the writer here, relies heavily on flashbacks, and in a way we have a movie of a young man preparing to go to war, with his girlfriend more afraid than he is about, and a father with troubles of his own, a whole panoply of memories that make up a young man's life.. The narration by Timothy Bottoms (from the wounded soldier's head) has an awkward delivery--the words work, the voice less so.

The book when I read it felt like a protest to the Vietnam war, even though it was published in 1939. The movie was meant, I'm sure, to target more specifically Vietnam, but now, in 2010, it's lost some of that immediacy, and it becomes a bit more abstract. It's also a bit of a moviemaker's exercise, due to the restriction of point of view (either literally, or through flashbacks).

No amount of analyzing will remove the horrors of this situation. The movie lingers when you think it should move on, and it stutters at times with some less than convincing acting. But when the communication actually begins, it's quite a thrill. Trumbo is a writer and screenwriter, and maybe this wears at the overall effect of the film, as a film. As a story, it remains devastating.

...since a film has actually moved me quite like this. I had read about half of Dalton Trumbo's original novel before seeing the film. The book is sort of difficult to read, but the movie is one big revelation. It may be because Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for it and directed his own original brainchild that this film is so incredibly dense and gripping.

Much has been said about the plot and storyline, so I won't get on that here. The bottom line is, this movie is as original and authentic today as in 1971 when it was made (Vietnam war era, no less!), or even as in 1939 (at the eve of WW II!), the year the novel first appeared on bookshelves. A timeless classic if there ever was one, and a glowing testimony to the eternal insanity of war. Oftentimes subtle and subversive, its dialogs fully expose the madness of the whole concept of it. But it doesn't stop there, the film also examines the conflict between religion and war and the absurdity that ensues from justifying bloodshed through creed.

I could go on forever trying to explain here why this movie is such a masterpiece to me, but maybe it's enough to tell whoever will read this to go buy the DVD. Like I said, it's a timeless anti-war classic that's worth every cent.

Some years ago I read "Johnny Got His Gun"and it changed my life and the way of my thinking.A perfect book with a unique subject and very interesting from the first page until the last. So when I decided to see the movie,I thought that I would see something incredible.But I was completely wrong. The excellent writer Dalton Trumpo proved himself as a totally untalented director.Not even a 10 percent of the meaning of the book,someone can see.The actors were extremely bad,especially Timothy Bottoms whose performance was rather ridiculous. Its a pity that someone else didn't have the chance to make it a masterpiece, as the book is.

In America,this film is underrated.In my native France,it's praised by intellectuals,and it's part of what we call "ciné-club movies".In high school,this very year,my son studied passages from the book as well as scenes from the movie. Trumbo's movie might be the strongest condemnation of war that had ever been filmed.Using two colors -and even three-,toying with present and past (could we speak seriously of future?),he makes the dream of such great predecessors as Jean Renoir (la grande illusion) come true:War is impossible,because how can a wise race could tolerate such an horror? Three colors indeed: -the bleak black and white in the hospital,where asceticism rivals the best of Robert Bresson. -the luminous,radiant scenes of Johnny's past,old forties and fifties color are constantly in evidence in those memories that recall Wyler's or Ford's heyday. -the dark and threatening color that envelops the nightmares in the ruins where Johnny tries to catch up with his only love. Johnny is helpless, his loneliness is more frightening than you'll ever experiment.God can't hear you call.The merciful Jesus of Sunday school whom Johnny's mother taught him to fear and to trust has disappeared with Donald Sutherland on a runaway train.Now it's a deaf and dumb Greek divinity -check the shots of the surrealistic nightmare-,who repeats in your suffering body,in your tormented soul ,in your mind on fire,that you cannot escape your inhumane fate. The nurse provides solace for a while.She tries to communicate with him .She believes in the dignity of man,be he a peace of flesh.It encompasses masturbation as well as simply saying "merry Xmas!"But for all the others,particularly for the officer,he's someone (something?)you must hide ,you must gag,because his world has gotten no place for a human being who represents such a slur on his pride and his glory. Johnny got a raw deal....

Vietnam determinedly enlightens Dalton Trumbo's repossession of old ground in the era of MASH and Catch-22. Trumbo's Johnny is, yes indeed, a guy named Joe, once a baker supporting his family, smitten with gentle Teresa Wright or Greer Garson-style girl, who joins the army because, why, "it's the sort of thing a fella oughta do, when his country is in trouble." All these familial figures are in essence Norman Rockwell collectibles. What a contrast when, in the trenches, he's sent on a round to hide a carcass that affronts a colonel's sense of smell. A shell lands near him. This is his last memory before he, regrettably, awoke, in a hospital.

The army is satisfied he has no cognizant mind. They resolve to keep him breathing only to study him. But he's cognizant all right, and little by little he becomes so of the horror of his wounds. He's literally captive within his mind, for a desperate eternity to anyone with no available concept of time, until he discovers a way of communicating with a compassionate nurse. Trumbo avails himself of a brilliant fast-cutting sequence, in a sense the sort one frequently sees in edgy late '60s and early '70s movies, but a particularly incisive and acute portrayal of mental disorientation, Bottoms struggling to organize his new life's routine without the aid of any physical outlet, no anchor for his thoughts, struggling to file them with constant bewildering disturbances and loss of bearings. Even telling day from night is a mystery for him to solve.

The upsetting premise benefits from Paths of Glory, La Jetée and the story of Helen Keller, but in no way does he tell his story in anything but the most inimitable way. Never before or since this film have we seen anything much like it. Because of Trumbo's determination to render the most exacting possible depiction of Bottoms' unique perception, there is even a transitional effect unique to this film, a fade to yellow when he feels the sun for the first time since his injuries. This truly unique work also unearths probably the most inventive use of voice-over I might've ever heard: He describes people we see as vibrations. When two nurses enter, he claims that now there are two vibrations. In a clever smidgen of much-needed levity, one nurse is fat, and he supposes it's a man.

A story that authentically imparts the loneliest possible consciousness, one where the subject can't even be sure whether or not he's alive, Trumbo draws on flashbacks and flights of a deserted, despairing imagination to make Joe alive for us, as he subsists in a living death. Evincing what could perhaps be argued as a level of bitterness in respect to the filming of Trumbo's human war tales in the past, or simply a yearning for the naivete of the old days, some memories and fantasies recreate the 1940s melodrama use of music, soft lens, close-ups and prosy dialogue. Then we find some of the brutal realities of real-life scenes are muted by some of that classic technique after awhile as well. The most pleasant flashback is the first, when Joe and his girl kiss in her living room and are cut short by her father, who sends them to her room, where there's a love scene of such softness and splendor that its resonance ring through the whole film. Representing Trumbo's own awe at his character is Donald Sutherland's Jesus, who counsels Joe in a celestial milieu more akin to how Trumbo might've truly wanted to portray the same fantasy in A Guy Named Joe over thirty years before.

Christ actually doesn't have much to put forward. He has no solutions because there are none. Indeed, the film closes with no political answers and without, as a matter of fact, even a political outlook. It purely presents a set of circumstances. Here was a loyal young American who went off and was hideously injured for no grand cause, and whose alert mind lives on as a staggering condemnation of powers that be who sent all the young men away to do this to one another.

Just watch it. Pacifist for life. Nothing will ever change me after this. The most horrifying experience ever. Dalton Trumbo made this possibly the greatest book to film creation of all time. People who love war are simply not human, and this movie shows it perfectly. The acting is normal, and it should be. Johnny is a normal man, as all men who fight for the machine. The human condition has never been portrayed as real as this. I now see why trumbo was named one of the Hollywood 10. He was not a genius. He was a messenger with a gift for seeing reality.

Watch this film.

NOW!

If you are at all squeamish than please avoid seeing Johnny Got His Gun. Not there is anything to see that is particularly, but Timothy Bottoms character in and of himself is one frightening example of what can come out of war and should it.

The unkindest cut of all is minutes before the armistice was declared in operation and the guns ceased, Timothy Bottoms receives a blast from a mortar shell. Everything that makes one relate to what's around is now gone from him, four limbs, the windows to the senses all gone. But more of his brain is intact than the doctors realize and the film is narrated by Bottoms trying to communicate and also his memories of much better times before the Great War.

Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood Ten had been back working for over a decade now from the blacklist, but here he was not writing a script but also was the director filming his own novel. No doubt certain people were looking for a hidden subversive message. But the only message that Johnny Got His Gun delivers is war is very bad thing and does terrible things to some human bodies.

Of course the title is a past tense of that opening verse of George M. Cohan's period flag waver Over There. So many young men from so many countries marched to war with those songs thinking war was some kind of honor thing. Honor if there ever was any in war was lost in that conflict where automatic weapons, poison gas, and the tank came to the fore. Kids with 19th century ideals like Bottoms as we see his reminiscences came up against something that flag waving nostrums didn't take into account.

Bottoms is brilliant in the film that first gave him stardom and the rest of the cast performs well. Credit goes to Dalton Trumbo for a necessary, but harrowing piece of cinema.

This unique movie has many powerful moments and could have been a masterpiece, if it were less pretentiously directed. There are some strange and rather absurd "fantasy" sequences that don't really work - for example, Donald Sutherland is billed as "Jesus Christ", and he isn't very convincing in the role. Still, it's an important movie, and well worth watching.

I saw Johnny Got His Gun at the theater when it was released. I feel I'm reading revisionist history in these reviews. Those at the time were not kind to it and it was easy to see why. When I saw it easily 25% of the audience left. I stayed to the bitter end and kept saying to myself this has to get better. Was I ever wrong. Afterwards I read a review in the Louisville Courier-Journal which basically said if this was the movie the anti-war movement thought would get its message across they made a grave error as over half the audience walked out.

If you want the anti-war message read the book.