The movie ends with no political solutions and without, in fact, even a political position. Christ really doesn't have much to suggest he has no answers, in Joe's fantasies, because there are no answers. Other scenes develop Joe's relationship with his father ( Jason Robards) and with Jesus Christ ( Donald Sutherland), whom he consults in fantasies.

He's an old Wobbly who sends them both into the bedroom, and there is a love scene of such tenderness and beauty that its echoes resound through the entire film. The most charming flashback is the first, when Joe and his girl kiss in her living room and are interrupted by her father. Trumbo uses flashbacks and fantasies to make Joe alive for us, while he exists in a living death. He is literally the prisoner of his mind, for years, until he finds a way of communicating with a sympathetic nurse ( Diane Varsi). But he can think, and gradually the enormity of his injuries is revealed to him. They decide to keep him alive simply to learn from him. The army is convinced he has no conscious mind. A shell lands near him, and he wakes up in a hospital. The boy works in a bakery, supports his mother and sisters after his father's death, is in love with an open-faced and sweet Irish girl, and enlists in the army because 'it's the sort of thing a fellow ought to do, when his country is in trouble.' Months later, he's sent on a patrol into no-man's land to bury a corpse that was offending a colonel's nose. Trumbo's soldier is Joe Bonham ( Timothy Bottoms), who comes from an American background that is clearly modeled on Trumbo's own. In this sense, his film resembles Joseph Losey's 'King and Country,' which also turned its back on the war in order to consider one ordinary, unremarkable soldier. He lets his ideology grow out of his characters, instead of imposing it from above. Instead of belaboring ironic points about the 'war to end war,' Trumbo remains stubbornly on the human level.

Johnny got his gun book review