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From novel to radio to cinema, Dalton Trumbo's cri de coeur on the impossible situation of war. "Unidentified casualty number 4-7" turns out to be the doughboy from Colorado (Timothy Bottoms), armless and legless and faceless in the wake of a shelling, "a piece of meat that keeps on living" under a tent on a hospital bed. La Jetée for the medical personnel looming out of the darkness, the first memory has the girl back home (Kathy Fields) and the old miner's gruff blessing of the couple's last night, a joke from The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. "Gonna make the world safe for democracy, aren't you?" Remembrance into fantasy into dream, the way of escape for the sensitive consciousness in the sawed-off torso. Mom (Marsha Hunt) and Dad (Jason Robards) are Norman Rockwell figurines, the pulpit of militarism is variously occupied by Ivy League orators and empty religious robes. Christ (Donald Sutherland) plays cards with doomed infantrymen before hauling them away in a phantom locomotive, later he shoos the protagonist from his shop with a sigh of mild irritation: "Maybe you should go. You're a very unlucky young man and I think it rubs off." (The Buñuel of The Milky Way is promptly recognizable as Trumbo's collaborator.) Loss of the cherished fishing pole, a matter between father and son. Paths of Glory, The Miracle Worker... The exaltation of sunshine and communication with the kindly nurse (Diane Varsi) mitigate the terror, the freak sideshow in his mind is ultimately the only useful destination, denied. After the wise-guy pyrotechnics of Catch-22 and MASH, a deliberate frugality of style to match the author's impassioned earnestness. "It itches. I wish someone'd scratch it." Lynch absorbs much of it for The Elephant Man. With Donald Barry, Eric Christmas, Sandy Brown Wyeth, Eduard Franz, David Soul, and Charles McGraw.
--- Fernando F. Croce |