Cinema
Man with a trunk
Christopher Hudson
There is a hero of Johnny Got His Gun (' X ' Cameo-Poly) but we never see his face, because it has been shot away. Johnny is Joe Bonham, a 'basket case.' On the last day of the first world war, returning with a detail ordered to bury an enemy corpse in no-man's-land, he dives into the same hole as an exploding shell. Bundled on to a stretcher, his remains are taken to a field hospital, where an army doctor decides to keep them alive as a medical experiment. His eyes, nose, teeth and jawbone are missing, but the doctor diagnoses that enough of his brain is left to keep his heart and lungs working. Otherwise he is a vegetable, to be nursed without horror or sentiment. "This young man," the doctor counsels, "will be as unfeeling, as unthinking, as the dead, until the day he joins them."
But he is wrong. Joe can think and feel. He can scream silently when his arms are amputated, and his legs. He can feel the cocoon of bandages around his trunk and the gauze mask protecting what is left of his shattered face. Lifting out of the jumble of dreams and memories, his mind interprets the sensations of the present with increasing vividness. He learns to recognise the tread of feet and the tubes threaded into him to feed and transfuse him. When a nurse, disobeying orders to keep his existence secret, opens the shutters, it is with intense happiness that he senses on his skin the warmth of the sun. He learns to tell the difference between day and night, and responds with delighted gratitude when his nurse traces Merry Christmas' in letters on his bare chest. Only when he begins to bang his head upon the pillow, signalling in Morse, "Kill me or display me as a warning to others," does the army realise with grave embarrassment what it has kept alive.
The history of the film bears out the warnings implicit in it. Dalton Trumbo wrote the novel Johnny Got His Gun nearly forty years ago, before he had done any serious writing for the screen. It became an immediate bestseller. A decade or so later, its indictment of militarism (which Joe McCarthy thought must be part of the Communist conspiracy) was among the misdemeanours' that got Trumbo blacklisted and eventually gaoled as one of the Hollywood Ten, and he was unable to resume writing for the cinema, except under pseudonyms, until the 'sixties. The paperback edition of the book was with
drawn, so I am told, shortly after Pearl Harbor. Its anti-militarism was considered bad for morale. After all this time, Trumbo has now managed to find, the money and the backers to make a film of it good enough to be distributed through normal commercial channels. And in an inspired piece of casting Timothy Bottoms, who played the lead in The Last Picture Show, takes the role of Joe Bonham.
The result, directed as well as written by Trumbo, is undoubtedly gruelling. It is also very moving. Joe's memories and dreams (photographed in colour, in contrast to the grey-and-white of the hospital room)• are both a defence against the present and an attempt to account for it. But as his mind wanders, to recollections of the girl he left behind or fishing trips with his father, we are made to see how hopelessly he is a victim of circumstances. Nothing could have saved him. It is no comfort to an armless, legless cripple to have his mother's voice reminding him he is made in the likeness of God. When, in a dream, he confronts Christ (Donald Sutherland in a carpenter's shop sawing crosses for the troops) and quietly explains that with no arms, eyes, ears or nose he can take none of the recommended precautions against nightmares, he is told that only a miracle can help. And miracles, as the Saviour sensibly points out, don't happen any more.
Concentrating on the wreckage of one average human being, and juxtaposing in him, pathetically, the remitting past with the unremitting present, the film conveys, as strongly as any film I have seen, the absolute pity of war. Appropriate, then, that, at the end, below the statistics of men and women killed or mutilated in wars since 1914, should read the legend made familiar in this context to disheartened generations by Wilfrid Owen: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
After many weeks, perhaps months, of poor-quality Hollywood glossies, it comes as a welcome relief to see a film which is as exciting and well-made as its publicity would lead us to believe. The Heist (' AA' Odeon, Leicester Square) is a pleasure to watch, and a wholly recommendable twohour entertainment. Set in Hamburg, it stars Warren Beatty as the crooked bank manager of the best-equipped bank in Europe, and, Goldie Hawn as a good-time girl (could she be anything else?) and his partner in crime. On the screen, if not in the plot, the combination is irresistible.
Why should it be so much better than The Burglars — another light-hearted thriller which relied heavily on an expensive production and good box-office names? The difference is that Richard Brooks, who wrote and directed The Heist, has taken the trouble to make his story hang together. From an early sequence in which Beatty proudly indicates the details of the bank's protective devices, we know that nobody is going to have an easy time of it. Nothing is superfluous — the champagne bottle filled with acid, the stripper hanged in a Reeperbahn cabaret, or the stopwatch, timed for the heist of one and a half million dollars, whose ticking, mistaken for a bomb, brings the thief unwanted oxyacetylene assistance. The chases are feasible, the escapes paced to the second. Beatty's engaging grin crumples the opposition; and Miss Hawn, no mere bubble and squeak girl, again manages to give an edge of real character to her perfectlytimed comic performance. The beginning, which switches back and forth between unexplained episodes, requires a little concentration to follow. After that, sit back and enjoy yourself.
The new Chabrol film Ten Days Wonder ('AA' Academy One) is disappointing, after his fine Le Boucher, for reasons I hope to have space for next week. Meanwhile you are warned off three other films which opened last week: Prime Cut ('X' Carlton), Joe Kidd (' AA' ABCs Edgware Rd and Fulham Rd) and A Fistful of Dynamite (' AA ' London Pavilion). Trying desperately to alleviate their apologies for storylines with episodes of gratuitous violence, they succeed merely in being vicious as well as boring.
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