Coming Home (1978)

Coming Home is very much Jane Fonda’s project. She commissioned Nancy Dowd to write a story about the impact of the Vietnam War on people at home in the States, which would be implicitly critical of US policy.

Fonda plays Sally Hyde, an Army wife married to Marine Corps action man Captain Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern). While he is serving his tour of duty in Vietnam, she takes a job in a veteran’s hospital where she meets her old high school classmate Luke Martin (Jon Voight) who is now an embittered Vietnam veteran paralysed from the waist down.

This condition does not prevent him from pleasuring her, however, and they embark on an affair that has a liberating effect on Sally. When her husband returns from Vietnam, traumatised by his experiences there, she has to choose between the two men.

Director Hal Ashby handles the love affair between Fonda and Voight with discretion, but the film slowly slithers into tearjerker territory while whole chunks of dialogue are lost in the din of a pounding rock soundtrack.

For a large part, the public gave this contemporary mixture of Since You Went Away and Brief Encounter a resounding thumbs down.

Sally Hyde
Jane Fonda
Luke Martin
Jon Voight
Captain Bob Hyde
Bruce Dern
Billy Munson
Robert Carradine
Vi Munson
Penelope Milford
Sergeant Dink Mobley
Robert Ginty
Pee Wee
Charles Cyphers
Nurse De Groot
Tresa Hughes
Fleta Wilson
Mary Jackson
Corrine
Olivia Cole
Virgil
Willie Tyler
Tim
David Clennon
Bruce
Arthur Rosenberg
Bozo
Lou Carello
Martha Vickery
Mary Gregory
Captain Earl DeLise
Beeson Carroll
Dr Lincoln
Bruce French
Pat
Richard Lawson
Kathy DeLise
Kathleen Miller
Johnson
Rita Taggert
Harris
Pat Corley

Director
Hal Ashby