Awarded the Special Jury Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, And Johnny took the rifle is the first and only film directed by American screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the best-known names in the ten of Hollywoodresurfaced publicly only in 1960 with Exodus by Otto Preminger. The film returns to the Croisette in the kaleidoscopic Cannes Classics section of Cannes 2024.
Lutzkendorf & Nibelungen Are Dead
On the last day of the First World War, Joe Bonham, a volunteer, is blown to pieces by a bomb. He no longer has arms, legs and face. Deprived of all sense organs, all that remains is his brain which he thinks and dreams. He tries to communicate with the nurse but, when he manages to do so by using Morse code with his head, the military doctors reject his pleas and keep him alive against his will… [sinossi – festival-cannes.com]
I don’t know whether I am alive and dreaming
or dead and remembering
How can you tell what’s a dream
and what’s real when you can’t even tell
when you’re awake and when you’re asleep?
Where am I?
– OneMetallica.
I joined the Communist Party in 1944 and left in 1948 under the pretext of being too busy to attend meetings: in any case they were as boring and revolutionary as a Wednesday evening service at the Christian Scientist church. When I returned from Mexico in 1954, although convinced that the American Communist Party had little future, I so resented the Smith Act trials and convictions of fourteen California Communist Party officials that I immediately applied to be reinstated in the party and I was accepted two months later. The Smith Act trials were so tasteless and the madness of McCarthyism so corrosive, the cowardice of the CIA liberals so odious that, with all my might, I wanted to be as close as possible to their victims. Under the pressure of this feeling I wrote The Devil in the Book. When the California convictions were overturned and the defendants freed, I left the party again, but with the same discretion with which I had entered.
– Dalton Trumbo1
«Emotionality» and «humanitarianism»2. Perhaps we should start from these two terms, used by Giuliana Muscio regarding Dalton Trumbo and his ideals, to approach And Johnny took the rifle (Johnny Got His Gun, 1971), to try to give it a political, aesthetic, human place. Trumbo’s first and only directorial, awarded the Special Jury Grand Prix at Cannes, this film is steeped in pacifism, but is also permeated by the clear awareness of being a work destined to remain unique, other, very far from commercial logic and possible future prospects. After all, Trumbo knew the rules of the game very well, the dynamics of struggle:
In Hollywood the fight for freedom of expression is inextricably linked to the fight for economic security. This dual battle takes the form of the writer’s demand for ownership of his ideas, free development of his scripts, and greater control of his material. It is the battle common to all progressive and workers’ organizations, just as the struggle of the latter for peace and security is the same as that of all film writers.3
Based on the novel of the same name published by Trumbo himself in 1939, And Johnny took the rifle it is the work of life, aopera world capable of crossing time: from the First World War (the time of the novel) to the Second (the moment of the publication of the book), up to the conflict in Vietnam (the release of the film coincided with the slow but inexorable withdrawal of the US army) . Still relevant and excruciating today, and certainly also in the future, the film shapes on the big screen the internal monologue of the unfortunate protagonist put on paper by Trumbo, delving not only into the conscience of the individual but above all into the bad conscience of the system, of capital, of the military macrocosm.
Anti-fascist, anti-militarist, tending to accumulate even brutal suggestions, putting the spectator in front of everything that has been thrown to the wind and the unthinkable and unspeakable dimension that cages the desperate protagonist, And Johnny took the rifle he doesn’t work on tiptoe like other thematically similar works – think of A grave for fireflies – but instead chooses to take a triple risky path that continually intertwines: the flashbacks of Joe Bonham’s life before the trenches, even as a child; the more dreamlike, religious, surreal phases, embellished by the presence of Donald Sutherland in the unlikely yet perfectly fitting role of Jesus Christ and by Jason Robards, the father, flamboyant and grandiose in the emblematic sequence of the circus wanderers; there imprisonment hospital, with twenty-year-old Joe reduced to a piece of meat, almost an experiment, sacrificed once again by the hypocrisy of war and military logic.
Blind, deaf and dumb, limbless, product monstrous of a “just and holy war for a long and lasting peace”, Joe is immersed in that black that opens the film after the archive images that accompany the opening credits. A darkness with no way out. The only possible escape, euthanasia, is obviously denied to him, yet another hypocritical act of a warmongering system. He, who would like to be carried through streets and squares like the monsters of Freaks, is instead condemned to darkness, to the shame of the system, to the denial of human compassion. To tell us about the protagonist’s dreams, nightmares and thoughts, Trumbo uses black and white in the hospital sequences, color for memories, for the wanderings of the mind. Sunlight as a sign of hope.
It doesn’t have the space-time slippages of Slaughterhouse 5 (Slaughterhouse-Five, 1972), not even its editing (which will be the starting point for Satoshi Kon’s cinema), but And Johnny took the rifle it moves between present and past always trying, on an aesthetic and narrative level, to accommodate a certain fluidity, thus amplifying spectatorial empathy. Fades to black, time jumps, split screens, the sound of the locomotive like the scream of the dead. Trumbo is not Malick, but his unique direction is ideally linked to The thin red line, to the power of reflection, of the word, of narrative plans. War as the crazy terminus of an entire generation. «When the Country needs you, you’ve gotta go. You should go.”
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