Watch Johnny Got His Gun For Free

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

. . . back in the 1950s because millionaires with guns are the most dangerous things in this world. Dalton Trumbo wrote JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN to warn America of the incipient Paddock Bannon Party (also frequently referred to as the Repug Party or the GOOPERS). Trumbo pictures former True Blue American Union Chief Johnny Wayne (nee Marion Mitchell Morrison, who became the self-proclaimed "Il Duce") with both legs, both arms, both eyeballs, both balls, and so forth blown off. Trumbo is saying with JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN that such emasculating total mutilation is what happens to a Man's immortal soul when he defects from the side of We True Blue Normal Average Loyal Patriotic Progressive Silent Majority 99 Per Center Union Label Citizens to throw in his lot with the Basket of Deplorable Corrupt Job-Killing Red Commie "Conservative" Capitalist Polluting Plunderer Class. Dalton knew that Wayne played a series of Robin Hood-like People's Champions during the 1930s before becoming a minion of Satanic Arch Demon John Ford. JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN Allegorizes what will become of America once the Racist Public Enemies such as Steve Paddock and Steve Bannon begin to "cull" We the American Masses. While "high roller" casino lizard gun nuts such as Paddock begin to machine-gun us away by the hundreds, this will merely be a sideshow fiendishly designed to distract us from the Main Threat to our Well-Being: casino lizards such as Steve Bannon and Don Juan Rump yanking away our Medicare, Food Stamps, Social Security, Veteran's Benefits, Medicaid, Planned Parenthood, Government Pensions, ObamaCare, National Parks, Health Inspectors, Job Safety Enforcers, Union Committee People, and so forth to kill us off by the millions! Jesus Christ Himself might as well be pictured at the controls of a runaway freight train mangling the Bodies of We the People, Dalton shows us with JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, since all the so-called "Christians" of the USA are in league with the Devil! Tragically, America did not heed the lessons of JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, allowing Wayne and his henchman Ward Bond--a fellow Ford "Stock Company" imp--to ride their Harleys up and down Hollywood Boulevard late into the night, clubbing any neatly dressed pedestrians for being gay (like Il Duce and Bond were Canadians bashing baby seals!). When America continued to honor Wayne and his ilk EVEN AFTER the release of JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, it became inevitable that crass millionaires and billionaires such as Il Duce, Rump, Bannon, and Paddock would soon be gunning for us both LITERALLY (as in Las Vegas with Paddock) and, even more threateningly, with the ill-gotten wealth they've stolen from us to produce record levels of Well-Being Inequality, with Rump, Bannon and company now looting the U.S. Treasury and funneling half of it to the Kremlin! If YOU don't want to join JOHNNY in His Living Grave, Trumbo tells us, you MUST join the movement to declare the Paddock Bannon Rump Repugs as the Public Enemies they are, strip them of their citizenship on the grounds of High Treason, use their stolen wealth to pay off the National Debt they ran up, and deport them as Traitors to Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf B (the only continent that will take them)!

Few films have left me so moved and shocked. I saw this film in passing, perhaps twice when I was in my teens. Half-hearted attempts to give it a name failed until I clicked through an IMDb list. It is gripping, moving and wonderfully told. You can never again lie awake in bed at night and not imagine how you would cope with such a nightmare. It poses so many questions about what it means to be alive, violent conflict, war, nursing and treatment and the right to live or die - even the 21st century question of what defines 'to be alive' and ways today to communicate through brain wave activity when there is nothing else to monitor. This should be seen by anyone with an interest in the First World War alongside documentaries, action thrillers, romances and comedy about conflict on this scale. As pertinent to those interested in the Second World War, indeed any conflict where a combatant is left horrendously broken and then kept in the quasi-statis of the undead.

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.

This wrenching tale about a basket case in which a young American soldier named Johnny -Timothy Bottoms - is hit by a bomb on the last days of the WWI . The story takes place in the mind of a quadruple amputee who has also lost his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. As the deaf and dumb Joe is limbless , faceless and confined to a semi-existence and he attempts to communicate with the staff -Edward Franz- and caretakers . Regaining consciousness, 20 and some year-old Joe Bonham slowly learns that while his brain is healthy and able to reason, the rest of his body is irreparably shattered, leaving him forever tied within the confines of his own imagination. Regarded as a vegetable and stuck in a light-less hospital utility room , he fantasizes and dreams about life before and after the artillery shell . He struggles valiantly to find some way to communicate with the outside world . Tapping his head on the pillow in Morse code he breaks through and pleads with his nurse -Diane Varsi- to be put on display as a living example of the cost of war.The black-listed Trumbo adapted his own novel, seemingly unfilmable , incredibly based on real events , approximately thirty years after he wrote it and shot at the climax of the Vietnam era . The picture is often sentimental, sometimes thought-provoking as well as terrifying . It is developed through a sustained interior monologue on a series of flashbacks to Johnny's infancy , his first and only night with his love interest -performed by Kathy Fields- , before leaving for the front , his employment in the local bakery and his relationship to his father- Jason Robards- and Christ well played by Donad Sutherland , including some breathtaking images in a train. The flick terminates captioning the following : ¨ War dead since 1914 : over 80.000.000 , missing or mutilated : over 150.000.000¨ . ¨ Dulce et decorum est pro Patria Mori ¨. The movie deservedly won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes 71 . This morbid anti-war and pro-euthanasia diatribe is very good film though a little bit boring , talky and depressing. It's recently remade (2008) in a special version by Rowan Joseph with Ben MacKenzie as Johnny .