Johnny Got His Gun (1971/Shout! Factory DVD)
Picture:
C- Sound: C- Extras: B Film: B-
Dalton
Trumbo’s 1971 adaptation of his 1939 anti-war book Johnny Got His Gun has existed in the realm of American cult cinema
for decades. This is partly because of
its unrelenting (read: marginalizing) criticism of war and the governments that
perpetrate it; partly because of its use in the video for the Metallica song
“One.” But like most cult films, its
status was cemented by a general inability to actually see it. Johnny
Got His Gun was available in America on VHS for a time before going out of
print, and bootleg copies generated from various international digital releases
proliferated online in the absence of a legitimate domestic DVD.
Shout!
Factory finally released the film on DVD in April 2009, and for the first time
in a long time American audiences can conveniently—and legally—experience what
is typically considered one of the most harrowing and enduring anti-war films.
That
legacy is affirmed in the broadest terms of the film’s narrative. Joe Bonham (Timothy Bottoms) leaves home to
fight in World War I and defend democracy.
Democracy repays him with a mortar that claims his legs, arms, and face,
and with it his sight and hearing, yet, horrifically, not his life. Kept alive by mad scientist military doctors,
Joe slips between reality and hallucination—he remembers moments with his
girlfriend Kareen (Kathy Fields) and his father (Jason Robards) while imagining
his life as a sideshow freak and having conversations with Jesus Christ (Donald
Sutherland). To keep Joe away from
prying eyes and morally appalled staff, he is filed away in a utility closet
with the blinds drawn. He can’t tell the
difference anyway, the military brass reasons.
Trumbo shot
the film in both black-and-white and color, an intriguing choice that binds us
to what we see. The ghastly reality Joe
is confined to is black-and-white, connecting us with the sensory deprivation
Joe is experiencing, while the flashbacks and fever dreams are in color, muted
as it is, a visual representation of Joe’s subconscious compensating for the
lack of real-world visual stimulation and giving us a breather from the cramped
horror show of the film’s present.
The
film’s reputation as great anti-war propaganda comes from the overwhelming
dread coursing through the film, especially in those black-and-white segments
but also in the pessimistic surrealism of the color scenes. Jesus as the conductor of a train, ethereal
white robes flowing, his screaming voice obstructed by soul-curdling whistle
blows. Joe’s sideshow act putting down
stakes in a desert for an invisible audience, with Joe’s father as barker and
his girlfriend as the scantily clad lady used as eye candy for the teeming,
paying masses. A mysterious orator,
played by Trumbo, pontificating about the glory of war in an all-white room
while a pantomimed tennis match is played behind him between smiling
mannequin-people.
These
hallucinations contribute to the film’s overarching sense of the world gone
crazy, and are as rife with despair as anything happening to Joe in
reality. But as dark as they are, they
release the tension of the black-and-white scenes through off-kilter black
humor and unrelenting lambasting of the people and world wrought by war. Though Trumbo directed the film, he
originally wanted Luis Buñuel to handle those duties. Scheduling conflicts
prevented this from happening, though some of these scenes are Buñuel’s
creation, which comes as no surprise when watching them.
It’s
unfortunate that Buñuel couldn’t direct the film; it would’ve probably been
better. Trumbo shot Johnny Got His Gun on a shoestring budget, which led to a cheap
feel to the film, especially in the present-day scenes of Joe in the
hospital. The set-up of Joe in the bed,
a racehorse feedbag-type mask on and tubes coming out of him, his room, and the
way the people are framed and shot has a low-rent Universal monster movie
quality, which works at creating a mood before becoming somewhat distracting. This was Trumbo’s first (and only) film as a
director, and it makes you wonder how another director with experience working
with no money on socially critical films (like Buñuel) would squeeze every last
resource for its maximum impact.
The
conceit of Johnny Got His Gun and
its last moment—a slow tracking shot up as Joe, begging for death, is enveloped
in Expressionistic darkness—are as gut-turning as the day they were conceived
and more than warrant the film’s reputation as a landmark anti-war picture. But unlike All Quiet on the Western Front, Johnny Got His Gun doesn’t feel timeless. Rather, it feels completely of its moment. It
hasn’t aged well and feels even more low-budget than it likely did in 1971.
Shout
doesn’t do the film any favors in this regard.
Fans and admirers of the movie have clamored for a stateside DVD release
of Johnny Got His Gun for years, and
they have been rewarded for their persistence with a disc that shows every last
imperfection of its nearly 40 years and is one of the most slipshod DVD
releases of the post-Blu Ray era.
The print
used for the release is inexcusably soft and inconsistent, while the soundtrack
is muddy and at times incomprehensible.
How much of this is the result of the assets on hand versus how the film
was shot and recorded in the first place is debatable. But the undeniable reality is that, while an
upgrade from VHS, Shout’s DVD is not much better. The image is cloudy, color scenes seem
blanched, and there are moments in the black-and-white sections where the image
will transition from an almost green-tinted shot to one that’s crisp and so off
in the contrast that you might as well be watching shadows. Meanwhile, speech is garbled, sound effects
happening in the background overtake dialogue happening in the foreground, and
the soundtrack sounds tinny.
The
extras are better, but still seem light for this moment in DVD history. There is an hour-long documentary on Trumbo,
“Dalton Trumbo: Rebel in Hollywood”; a new interview with star Timothy Bottoms;
eight minutes of “rare” behind-the-scenes footage with commentary by Bottoms
and Director of Photography Jules Brenner; the 30-minute 1940 radio adaptation
of the book starring James Cagney; a 1971 article on Johnny Got His Gun from American
Cinematographer Magazine; the original trailer; the Metallica “One” video;
and a replica movie poster.
The
centerpiece of the extras is the Trumbo documentary, which features Trumbo’s
son, Bottoms, and other friends, collaborators, and admirers. While a discussion about Johnny Got His Gun is featured in the documentary, it’s more
concerned with Trumbo’s history as a member of the Hollywood Ten blacklist and
the legacy of that blight on American culture.
This might be fine for anyone unfamiliar with the blacklist and Trumbo’s
importance to breaking it, but a better feature-length documentary (Trumbo) and
more substantive historical material (part of the extras on Criterion’s Spartacus release) exists exploring
this same topic.
The
behind-the-scenes footage might be interesting to die hard fans, but it doesn’t
offer any great insight into the film, nor does the commentary attached to
it. The trailer is, amazingly, in even
worse shape than the film itself.
Everything else is what you’d expect from their descriptions.
Johnny Got His Gun has long been missing from the
American home video market, and in that sense any release is a good one. This movie is on that people ranging from its
creators to staunch supporters proclaim as one of the great anti-war pictures
of American or any other cinema. But
just because the film has a cult following doesn’t mean it deserved cult
treatment in its DVD debut.
- Dante A. Ciampaglia
