University of Virginia Library

CINEMA

Johnny Get Your Hankie

By BARRY LEVINE

Reviewing an antiwar film is
like reviewing one that
preaches racial justice or
celebrates love: one knows that
the heart is in the right place
even if the head is not.
"Johnny Got His Gun," which
opened yesterday in town, not
only plays on our natural
sympathies, but drains them of
all sensitivity.

Timothy Bottoms, who had
a abbreviated elopement with
Cybil Sheppard in "The Last
Picture Show," plays Joe, a
G.I. who is caught by an
artillery shell in a World War I
trench. He is literally blown
apart by the explosion, which
occurs at the very beginning of
the film, and he awakens in a
hospital to discover in horror
that his arms, legs, and face are
gone. While the chief surgeon
certifies that all of his brain
had been destroyed except that
controlling bodily functions,
we know through his internal
monologue that Joe is not the
incommunicable mass he was
thought to be, but an
immobilized and sentient being
who is aware of his own
isolation.

In fact, the whole film is an
extended internal monologue,
which is its first problem.
Although we are supposed to
be inside Joe's head, examining
his present and exploring his
past with him, we are often
shown events of which Joe
does not have knowledge: for
example, we see and hear
doctors talking across the
room, seen in an angle away
from the bed or even outside
the room, as we hear Joe in an
overvoice thinking what they
might be saying. We listen to
and at times see Joe's thoughts
and memories from the inside,
but in the present we see his
state from the outside. This
perspective asks up to assume a
position of both selective
omnipotence and character
identification, to be both
isolated from him and one with
him.

Dalton Trumbo, who
directed and adapted this film
from his own novel, makes
certain we see both worlds
through Joe's consciousness.
The bleak present is in grainy
black-and-white, and the
memories and dreams are in
color. Alain Resnais reversed
the technique in his 1954
remembrance of the
concentration camps, "Night
and Fog," with the horrors of
the Second World War in
black-and-white and the living
present in color.

In Resnais, the technique
somehow seemed necessary; we
always tend to remember our
pasts in stark contrasts and the
present in shades. And even
though Trumbo's treatment
forces Joe's consciousness on
ours, we realize – again and
again – that it is his present
that is bleak and his past alive.

Such insistent
heavy-handedness make the
film overwhelmingly
self-pitying and oppressively
mournful. And even though we
are supposed to see Joe's
conceptions of his life, some of
them are pretty hard to take:
Don Sutherland as Christ, who
lives in Joe's dreams, preaches
solemnly on war, and builds
wooden crosses on the side;
Jason Robards as the boy's
father, whose redeeming
distinction in life was a prized
fishing-pole until Joe tearfully
lost it on their last fishing trip
together; and a musical score
by Jerry Fellding that avoids
no swelling music, wind
chimes, or solo violin to touch
our emotions. The result is a
film that says what it has to
say so many times, in so many
ways, that it becomes more
and more melodramatic in
order to reach us. If it weren't
so close to our own fears and
hatred of war, "Johnny Got
His Gun" would be ludicrous.
(Now at the University)

"Johnny Got His Gun": Playing On Natural Sympathies