Coming Home ***** (1978, Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern, Penelope Milford, Robert Carradine, Robert Ginty) – Classic Movie Review 2053

Director Hal Ashby’s high-impact, liberal-minded, issue-led 1978 triple Oscar-winning classic triumphed at the Academy Awards. Jon Voight and Jane Fonda won Oscars for Best Actor and Best Actress as Luke Martin, a bitter, wheelchair-bound Vietnam War veteran, and Sally Hyde, the simple but sexy young wife of gung-ho overseas US Marine Corps Captain Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern). While her husband is fighting in Vietnam, Sally meets and falls in love with Luke, who has suffered a paralysing combat injury over there. The plot follows the trio’s love triangle.

Thanks to the powerhouse performances, this 1968-set searing love story and anti-war drama is grand emotional drama, even maybe just slightly more rewarding than Oliver Stone’s similar, later Born on the Fourth of July (1989), with Tom Cruise.

Fonda had kick-started the project years earlier as the first feature for her own production company, IPC Films (for Indochina Peace Campaign). She planned to make a film about the Vietnam War inspired by her friendship with Ron Kovic, a paraplegic Vietnam War Veteran, who she met at an anti-war rally. Kovic had recently completed his autobiographical book Born on the Fourth of July, the basis for Stone’s movie, in which Cruise plays him.

Fonda asked Nancy Dowd, an old friend from her days in the feminist movement, to write a story about the consequences of the war seen through the eyes of a military wife that would attack America’s war policy. Dowd’s story, titled Buffalo Ghosts, focused on two women volunteers at a veteran’s hospital who face the emotional toll the war takes on its casualties and their families.

The project dragged on for six years until Fonda’s entire new team of collaborators forged out Coming Home that in the event it is all about the characters and the personal drama that propels the movie and tells the story. Obviously it has an agenda, reflecting the whole team’s opposition to the Vietnam War, but it doesn’t feel too issue led, apart from the general concern for the veterans returning to America who were facing difficulties adapting to life back home. This places in in the noble tradition of the post-World War Two drama The Best Years of Our Lives.

Even if Coming Home does slightly go into emotional overdrive and sometimes stray in to posh soap opera territory, it is still an outstanding, even great movie that is mighty effective in all departments and a big achiever in all its aims. It premiered at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival where Voight won the Best Actor award. It went on to great reviews and to be a big hit. Costing $3million, it took more than $32million at the box office.

In star support, Dern, cast away from his stereotype in sadistic roles, is no less persuasive than the Oscar-winning stars, so was unlucky not to win Best Supporting Actor award at the Oscars. He’s still never won, despite another good chance in 2013 with Nebraska.

Nancy Dowd (original story) and screenplay writers Waldo Salt and Robert C Jones also won the film’s third Oscar for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. And there were five other nominations: for Best Picture (producer Jerome Hellman), Best Supporting Actor (Dern), Best Supporting Actress (Penelope Milford), Director, Best Film Editing (Don Zimmerman).

It is Fonda’s second Best Actress Oscar, after Klute (1971). She holds seven Oscar nominations, the most recent for The Morning After (1986). Her first was for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). It is Voight’s only Oscar, with three other nominations.

The cinematographer is Haskell Wexler, renowned for various Sixties and Seventies classics, including In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Faces and The Conversation. Considered one of the ten most influential cinematographers in movie history, he won Best Cinematography Oscars for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bound for Glory and was nominated for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Matewan (1987) and Blaze (1989).  He died peacefully in his sleep on December 27 2015, aged 93.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2053

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