Johnny Got His Gun

If you were a teenage boy with a leaning towards hard rock music around the late 80's, you probably remember seeing the Metallica video for "One" which featured eerie clips of the Dalton Trumbo movie, "Johnny Got his Gun." And, if you worked in a video rental store during that period, you were probably sick of pimply-faced, mullet-wearing kids coming into your store, growling a request as to whether or not you had this movie in inventory. Perhaps it was a product of growing up in a small town that neither my friends nor I ever found the VHS; I only knew one person who had claimed to find and watch the movie, but since he could provide no particular details about the rental location or, for that matter, the plot of the movie, I like most people didn't believe him.

Actually, I wasn't terribly obsessed with finding the film. Interested, sure, but there were other Clive Barker horror films out there to sooth my need for the morbid. I soon forgot about the film, and life went on.

...until this week, actually, when I was skimming through the digital cable guide and, rather unwittingly, came across TCM's listing and saw the film was going to be aired Wednesday night. My morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I stayed up until midnight to watch the film.

I think the viewing was worth the wait. There's a musical lead-in of military marching drums that sets a bad tone that a self-indulgent war flick will follow, but a dark human element was immediately introduced. I suspect I'm not giving much away by stating the premise of the film is centered on the emotional trial of a soldier who was critically wounded in a war with no means to communicate to those providing him care. Consequently, the film is narrated by the soldier's thoughts both in the present predicament, flashbacks to his past, and fantasies and delusions as he tries to escape from his personal, bodily entrapment.

The film's strength is in what it doesn't show or provide the viewer. There is no gore visualized in the injuries sustained by the soldier, there is little indication into the passage of time (until the very end of the film), and there are barely any characters who are given more than a slight title to identify them against. The film captures the man's lack of understanding by providing a lack of understanding, drawing us into the torture he is experiencing.

As a 1971 adaptation of a 1939 book, there are a few timestamps that unfortunately date the film. Donald Sutherland has a short yet stereotypical role as a, "look at how much of a trippy hippy I am" character he seemed wont to play during the time period. The fantasies, creepy in themselves, all contain an element of leftover 60's psychedelic flavoring. But these tiny distractions are easy to overlook, and the entire package of this movie is worth the effort to see.

Personally, it was revealing to me that such a story could be authored in 1939. History has a way of glorifying the World War II era, and I think the elements that posed another view of the violence have been buried and rotted over the years. Tales like Johnny Got His Gun and Barefoot Gen provide another view, dismal in their presentation, but thoughtful and sometimes commonplace in retrospect.