"Johhny Got His Gun"

[McKenzie]

"Here was war in its ultimate horror. A slab of flesh in an American uniform had been found on the battlefield, still alive, with no legs, no arms, no face, blind, deaf, unable to speak, but the heart still beating, the brain still functioning, able to think about his past, ponder his present condition, and wonder if he will ever be able to communicate with the world outside.

For him, the oratory of the politicians who sent him off to war—the language of freedom, democracy, and justice—is now seen as the ultimate hypocrisy. A mute, thinking torso on a hospital bed, he finds a way to communicate with a kindly nurse, and when a visiting delegation of military brass comes by to pin a medal on his body, he taps out a message. He says: Take me into the workplaces, into the schools, show me to the little children and to the college students, let them see what war is like.

Take me wherever there are parliaments and diets and congresses and chambers of statesmen. I want to be there when they talk about honor and justice and making the world safe for democracy and fourteen points and the self determination of peoples …. Put my glass case upon the speaker's desk and every time the gavel descends let me feel its vibration …. Then let them speak of trade policies and embargoes and new colonies and old grudges. Let them debate the menace of the yellow race and the white man's burden and the course of empire and why should we take all this crap off Germany or whoever the next Germany is …. Let them talk more munitions and airplanes and battleships and tanks and gases and why of course we've got to have them we can't get along without them how in the world could we protect the peace if we didn't have them ….

But before they vote on them before they give the order for all the little guys to start killing each other let the main guy rap his gavel on my case and point down at me and say here gentlemen is the only issue before this house and that is are you for this thing here or are you against it."

Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, Bantam Books, 1983

[BrklynLiberal]

1. THAT was a classic!!!!!

Can you believe they actually made a movie out of it..in 1971??!!


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067277/



Johnny Got His Gun (1971)
Directed by Dalton Trumbo

Writing credits
Dalton Trumbo (also novel)


User Comments: Mind blowing and original (more)

User Rating: ********__ 7.6/10 (1,286 votes) Vote Here

Complete credited cast:
Timothy Bottoms .... Joe Bonham
Kathy Fields .... The Girl
Marsha Hunt .... Joe's Mother
Jason Robards .... Joe's Father
Donald Sutherland .... Christ
Diane Varsi .... Fourth Nurse

[Lisa]

2. ironic that the actor who portrayed Joe Bonham in the movie ....

(Timothy Bottoms) -- later went on to play George W. Bush, on Comedy Central and in a made-for-TV movie.

Talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

[aquart]

3. Trumbo. One of the Hollywood Ten?

[BrklynLiberal]

4. Yes. He was blacklisted and wrote under a pseudonym for years.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/johnnygun/context.html

After the war, Trumbo and several other Hollywood writers, directors, and producers were called to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ten of these men—who came to be known as the Hollywood Ten—refused to answer questions about their own involvement in the Communist Party or to give names of others. On the stand, Trumbo famously said to chief investigator Richard Stripling, "Very many questions can be answered 'Yes' or 'No' only by a moron or a slave." All ten men were sentenced to prison terms and blacklisted from the film industry.

Trumbo served his one-year prison sentence and continued to write scripts for the black market. He was able to legitimately write scripts again in 1959. Trumbo continued to write successful screenplays, including a film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun, until his death in 1976.

[Spinzonner]

6. The same

Screenwriter for Spartacus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Trumbo

[BrklynLiberal]

5. I heard it was based on a story heard of a Bristish soldier from WWI.

I did find this note:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/trumbo.htm

From an early age Trumbo was determined to be a novelist. The inspiration for his anti-war story Johnny Got His Gun came when he read an article about a British officer, who was horribly disfigured during World War I.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/johnnygun/context.html

Trumbo conceived of the project of Johnny Got His Gun early in the 1930s, after reading an article about the Prince of Wales's visit to a Canadian veterans hospital to see a soldier who had lost all of his senses and his limbs. Trumbo did not begin work on the novel until 1937. It was finally published in 1939, two days after the outbreak of World War II. Though the novel was a pacifist piece published in wartime, it was well reviewed and won an American Booksellers Award in 1940. When the first print run finished, however, Trumbo agreed that the novel should not be reprinted until the end of World War II.

[deutsey]

7. Excellent but very sad book

[catmandu57]

8. It was assigned reading in my eighth grade english class

That and Alas Babylon.