Luis Buñuel, whose contribution to the script survived his withdrawal from directing the project, appears to have been of two minds about the film Johnny Got His Gun that Dalton Trumbo himself directed during the Vietnam War. Buñuel found Trumbo’s film “overlong and overintellectualized,” but also felt that it “has the same power” and “disturbing quality” as Trumbo’s antiwar novel on which the film is based and which first appeared on the verge of the Second World War in September 1939. Buñuel was correct, of course, in both regards. The film, for whose script Trumbo received exclusive official credit, took two major prizes at Cannes, including the prize of the international critics.
A completely dark screen is held in complete silence for several heartbeats—an encouragement for the viewer, who is sitting in a darkened theater, to identify with Joe Bonham, the 17-year-old boy whose close encounter with a mortar shell in the First World War has left him, his doctors and nurses believe, brain-dead. (The background the boy is given suggests that Trumbo also identified with Joe.) However, the interior monologue that we hear from the victim, a form of voiceunder and dramatic irony, tells us that Joe’s mind, at least, is intact; we see his current state—that is, we do not see it, for what remains of Joe is buried under swathes and sheets—in black and white, while his memories and dreams appear in color. Blind, deaf and unable to speak, Joe is as helpless as a newborn, and one by one his limbs are surgically removed—his screamed protests only we can hear—so that what is left of him can be medically studied. Joe finally learns to communicate through Morse-code head-knocks, but even his visionary encounters with Jesus help him not one iota.
Jason Robards, Jr., is wonderful as Joe’s father, whose prized fishing-pole—consider it a working-class Prospero’s wand—musters compensation for his failures to succeed in life, for instance, as a salesman trying to support his family. This Prospero “gives up” his “magic” by his son’s losing it; but Trumbo, here at least, shortcircuits sentimentality by having (upon the father’s death) a teenaged Joe apologize for its loss before we know its importance. Indeed, the phallic pole always was Joe’s to lose from the time, as a young boy, he asked his father which Bonham loved more, him or the pole, and Bonham answered (with a gleam only we can fathom) that the pole, being special, commands more of his heart. Joe immediately protests that he himself is “special,” offering as proof his determination, when he grows up, not to go off to kill in war.
One wonders: Did it make Joe feel better to declare his filial love to the corpse of his father? Regrettably, like so much that’s clunkish in this film, we may later be annoyed when Joe’s younger self, in the further-back flashback, refuses to throw his arms around his father although his father begs him to. But Joe’s remembering all this in his presumed vegetable state is a kind of catch-up of understanding. The neediness to which America reduced his father America (by seducing him to enlist, to make the world “safe for democracy”) has now reduced Joe, and he knows it. I itch, he remarks. Why doesn’t somebody scratch it?
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MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
THE SWORD OF DOOM (Kihachi Okamoto, 1966)
May 16, 2010A fine work whose brilliant finale lifts up the whole, Kihachi Okamoto’s Dai-bosatsu tôge—literally, The Pass of the Boddhisattva—thematically revolves around the price exacted by responsibility and the burden of history. Those who classify the protagonist, Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai, excellent), as “evil” or “sociopathic” are being ridiculous: within the film the first adjective is applied to him by irresponsible sorts, including master swordsman-teacher Toranosuke Shimada (Toshirô Mifune, perfect), who fail to grasp the complexity of Tsukue’s moral predicament; the second adjective comes from reviewers anachronistically applying a currently fashionable concept back through time. The black-and-white film derives from Kaizan Nakazato’s popular novel whose three-decade serialization began in 1913.
Meant to launch a trilogy, the film covers two years, beginning in 1862, during which Tsukue, a samurai deft with his sword, kills many individuals, mostly in either just retribution or self-defense. However, we first see him kill an old man praying at a Buddhist shrine on a mountain-top. What is this man’s prayer? To have his life ended so that he is no longer a burden to his granddaughter, who is off searching for water. Tsukue’s unswerving focus generates myopia, perhaps, but he is scarcely cold and evil; rather, he is duty-bound. Episodic, the film ends (in a freeze frame) in a bloodbath; by this time having been disgraced and, under an assumed identity, having joined a horde of assassins that is poised to turn on him, Tsukue crosses paths with the granddaughter from the first episode, a geisha house novice. Tsukue, who is by now also associated with the coming end of the Shogunate in 1868, strikes out at ghosts—shadows of those he has dispatched, which materialize as the assassins, whom he ferociously cuts down, one after the other.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
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