Trumbo is primarily a screenwriter ('Hawaii,' 'The Sandpiper,' 'The Horseman,' etc.), screenwriting is only the worst of the film's several failures. On any terms that I might recognize and possibly credit, 'Johnny Got His Gun' is a stultifyingly bad movie.Although Mr. And yet they are virtually all the thought that gets into the film, the rest being a mess of clichéd, imprecise sentimentalizing and fantasizing. The second, though questionable, is also uninteresting.

The first of these ideas seems unquestionable, but uninteresting. 'Johnny Got His Gun' has perhaps two ideas: one, that war is a crime, and two, that it is a crime committed by the old against the young. But insistent virtue, without ideas, becomes demagoguery. Joe both feels and remembers, and his feelings and his memories are, in colored flashback and monochrome present action, the substance of the film.It should be obvious that, like its hero, 'Johnny Got His Gun' is shrouded in virtue. The story strongly reflects the emotional strategy of pacifist sentiment between the wars, and in the film makes some effort to re-create not only the intentions, but also the tone of that strategy.The hero of 'Johnny Got His Gun,' whose name is Joe, is an American soldier who on the last day of World War I, has his arms, his legs and his face blown off by an artillery shell.Nevertheless, he survives, and, as a medical curiosity, he is kept alive beneath sheets and a gauze mask by doctors who believe that his brain is so damaged as to render him a living vegetable. Trumbo's own antiwar novel, originally published in September, 1939, almost on the eve of World War II. 59th Street Twin Cinemas, was written and directed by Dalton Trumbo, after Mr. 'Johnny Got His Gun,' which opened yesterday at the R.K.O.

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