Classic anti-war, disability film, "Johnny Got His Gun," out on DVD

A review from the Hartford Courant:

Dalton Trumbo brought his 1939 novel to the screen during the Vietnam War, when its angry anti-war theme made it especially timely. To help it find its audience, its famous poster was dominated by a hand making a peace sign. But the soldier silhouetted within the hand is from a different time: World War I.

Joe Bonham (Timothy Bottoms) is an 18-year-old American who goes off to fight in France, and nearly makes it home unscathed. But in the last hours of the war, an artillery shell blows away his arms, legs, ears, eyes and jaw. Ironically, he was exposed to enemy fire as he was burying an enemy soldier whose corpse had been hung up on barbed wire near the trench. That's gratitude for you.

But Joe's not dead, though he'll soon wish he were. Doctors attach him to tubes and house him in a hospital's utility closet, where they hope only his nurses will see him. Most of the film takes place in Joe's mind, as he fantasizes about meeting Christ (Donald Sutherland), talking with his recently deceased father (Jason Robards) and reuniting, in a fashion, with his girlfriend.

One fantasy features Trumbo himself, lecturing on how war is good for scientists, freeing them of the usual societal constraints on inventing more terrible weapons. In another dream, his father tells a 10-year-old Joe that he'll make the world safe for democracy. When Joe asks what democracy is, his dad says he's not sure, but that it seems to require young people to kill each other.

That typifies the ham-fisted speechifying that makes this film more allegory than story. And a 106-minute allegory can get tiresome, like a long lecture on why war is bad. The film gets more involving toward the end, when Joe discovers he can communicate with his keepers by Morse code, only to have this breakthrough backfire, increasing his isolation instead of relieving it. The last thing the Army wants is for this torso with a brain to tell the world what he's thinking.

The DVD includes several good extra features: an hour-long documentary about Trumbo, who is probably the most famous victim of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s, and the making of "Johnny Got His Gun," plus a 30-minute radio version, starring James Cagney as Joe, that aired in 1940. Not long after, preaching against war fell out of favor in a world threatened by the blatantly evil Nazis.