Johnny Got His Gun

Johnny Got His Gun (1971) is an American anti-war drama you can watch online on iFILM. Writer-director Dalton Trumbo adapted his own 1939 novel — Timothy Bottoms plays Joe, a young soldier left blind, deaf, mute and limbless by a shell in the final hours of the First World War. Jason Robards and Donald Sutherland appear in key flashback sequences.

Joe is alive. His mind is intact. Without sight, sound or the ability to communicate, he drifts between hospital darkness and memory — his father on a fishing trip, a girl he loved, ordinary conversations that now feel like transmissions from another life. Trumbo shoots every recollection in warm colour and every hospital moment in black-and-white, and the boundary between the two starts to dissolve.

The film struggled for US distribution — too bluntly anti-military for 1971 audiences. At Cannes that year it picked up both the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI award. It found a far wider audience in 1989, when Metallica used its footage for the "One" music video. Stream Johnny Got His Gun (1971) online on iFILM.