Basket Case

By JAY COCKS

"I believe in message pictures," Daiton Trumbo said recently, and Johnny Got His Gun, his first film as a di rector, comes heavily stamped and post marked "Urgent." As one of Holly wood's most prominent scenarists (Exodus, Hawaii), Trumbo has always had a tendency to bear down so heavily that he often blunts the points he is la boring so hard to drive home. He does so again in Johnny, which he adapted from his own 1939 antiwar novel.

A Tapped Message. Joe is a World War I doughboy who gets blown to bits by a shell. His arms, legs and face gone, Joe is kept alive as an experimental curiosity, locked in a hospital closet. One of the Army surgeons states confidently that Joe can feel nothing.

But Joe not only feels; he remembers (his Midwest childhood) and he fantasies (playing a hand of cards with Jesus Christ). After months of mute anguish, Joe is assigned a pretty young nurse who takes pity on him and even makes love to him. Joe eventually hits on the notion of communicating by tapping out Morse code with his head against the pillow.

Doctors and top military brass, who have previously regarded him as a hope less basket case, come running and are aghast at his message: kill me. The request is refused. No one will accept the responsibility for his death or acknowledge publicly his continued existence.

Best to keep things as they are. So Joe is left locked in his hospital room, banging out his pitiful message, a barely surviving symbol of human barbarism.

A Dead Voice. A promising young actor named Timothy Bottoms portrays Joe by turning the ritual clumsiness of a newcomer to good advantage. Jason Robards plays Joe's father with only intermittent conviction, while Diane Varsi, as the nurse, seems to be recovering from some esoteric halucinogen.

Trumbo's pacifism is patently honest, but he presents his convictions as if they were credentials, assuming that audiences in sympathy with his ideas must automatically accept his art. Having the right instincts is simply not enough.

Jay Cocks

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