JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN 183
Joe blesses her for releasing him from his agony, but before Joe dies, the brigadier
general returns, opens the air clamp, and orders the nurse to leave. Feeling the
nurse’s footsteps fading away, Joe despairs. After the doctor injects him, Joe weakly
continues tapping out his SOS, knowing that he is condemned to his private hell
until death releases him in his old age.
Reception
After it was accepted for “out- of- competition screening only” at the 24th Cannes
Film Festival (May 1971), the festival’s panel of critics unanimously declared that
Johnny Got His Gun deserved to be in the main festival. The film went on to win
the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and the FIPRESCI Prize. Director Claude LeLouche
(A Man and a Woman), who was in attendance at its screening, wept and pronounced
Johnny “the greatest film I’ve ever seen” (Haber, p. 63). Also entered at the Atlanta
Film Festival five weeks later, the movie won the Golden Phoenix Award for “Best
of Festival” and the Golden Dove Peace Prize. Subsequent commercial exhibition,
however, was extremely limited and the film lost money. Reviews were likewise
mixed. Roger Ebert liked it: “Trumbo has taken the most difficult sort of material—
the story of a soldier who lost his arms, his legs, and most of his face in a World
War I shell burst— and handled it, strange to say, in a way that’s not so much anti-
war as pro- life. Perhaps that’s why I admire it” (Ebert, 1971). Film critic Walter
Lowe was more ambivalent. Though he termed it “excellent and highly recom-
mended,” Lowe felt that Trumbo “got carried away” with “overly surrealistic cam-
era work on the dream sequences,” an approach that “that tended to separate the
dream scenes from the memories, which is contrary to the intent of the novel, which
ran dreams and memories and real ity together so they were barely distinguishable
from one other” (Lowe, 1971).
Reel History Versus Real History
For a soldier to lose all four limbs and his face in a bomb blast and still survive in
hospital sequestration was an extreme rarity but evidently did happen; as noted
earlier, the terrible injuries suffered by Joe Bonham were based on two or three
actual cases. One might, however, take issue with Trumbo’s depiction of Joe’s med-
ical treatment—or lack thereof. Missing limbs were replaced with prosthetic ones,
and army doctors made heroic efforts to reconstruct war- shattered faces through
plastic surgery. Failing that, prosthetic faces were devised. Still, it is plausible that
a so- called “basket case” of the severity of Joe Bonham might have elicited the kind
of sequestration and non- treatment shown in Johnny Got His Gun.