HAL ASHBY, director of the first magnitude, is at the exclusive Carlyle Hotel in New York, talking on the 'phone with his agent. He is fervent, vigorous and sparkles his speech with a jubilant glee, because even though the agent hasn't set a deal for the next film, there is a wealth of material to sort out and choose from, and the prediction of that Coming Home, Ashby's latest film, is going to outgross Shampoo, which thus far has done 22 million dollars in rentals.

When I visited Ashby at the Carlyle, he was, as usual, barefoot and wearing corduroy jeans and a plaid shirt - his work clothes. Certainly not the image one conjures up of the Hollywood director. But then, Ashby has never been 100 per cent establishment, and his films reflect, whether it be Harold and Maude, in which a 20 year-old rich boy falls in love with an 80 year-old woman, or Bound for Glory, the story of folk singer Woody Guthrie, his scepticism of human nature and the unique ways people cope with success and failure.

Coming Home, which some reviewers have labelled his best film, was a picture five years on the drawing board, one which almost every studio gave the thumbs-down to, and it is only due to Jane Fonda's persistence that the picture has seen the light of day. But one can understand the studio's reluctance to finance such a product. After all, the Vietnam war, which this film chronicles, was a national embarrassment to the American public; it cost thousands of lives, a fortune to fight, and it broke up families and divided the nation. People may not want to relive such a trauma. and the studios did not want to take the gamble. Until now, of course. Because there are a half-dozen or so Vietnam-orientated films scheduled for release in the coming year, one being Francis Ford Coppola's long-awaited Apocalypse Now.

But Ashby's movie is, like The Best Years of Our Lives, more a love story, or character study, than a war film, because there are no battle scenes. It's about the battle on the homefront and what happens when a woman falls in love with a paraplegic, a so-called 'War Hero', while her husband, a Marine captain, is overseas fighting a war 'because it's expected of him'. It's about changes, about growing up, about facing responsibilities and learning to live with one another, and it's told with honesty and compassion, two ingredients one sees throughout Ashby's work. Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Bruce Dern play the woman, the paraplegic, and the captain, respectively.

Today, Ashby is what's known as a 'hot' director, and his attachment to a particular film property is all that's needed to get the cameras rolling. But it wasn't always that way, and Ashby is not one to forget the 15 long and difficult years it took him to rise to the ranks of director.

Born in Ogden, Utah, Ashby's childhood was not an entirely happy one. He didn't get along with his family (his parents were divorced when he was five or six), and dropped out of high school in his senior year to hitchhike to Los Angeles. He was married and divorced twice before he was 21.

Eventually, he found work as a multilith operator at the Republic Studios, and it was while running off 90 or so copies of some page 14, he says, that the idea of becoming a film director flashed upon him. And when he queried those around him for advice, the most common remark was: The best school for a director is in the cutting room.'

Luckily, Ashby had a friend who hired him as an apprentice editor, which led to a meeting with editor Bob Swink and work on The Big Country, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Young Doctors, The Children's Hour, The Greatest Story Ever Told and others. But his first solo effort came eight years later, because of a union rule which demands you work that length of time as an apprentice, when he cut The Loved One for director Tony Richardson. But because Richardson had commitments in London, Ashby was only able to do a first cut before the film was taken to Europe. However, the producer of that film introduced him to Norman Jewison, and thus started a long and fruitful association between the filmmakers. Ashby edited The Cincinnati Kid, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, In The Heat of the Night (for which he won an Oscar), The Thomas Crown Affair, and Gaily, Gaily for Jewison.

Jewison also promoted Ashby to associate producer status, and when he had problems scheduling The Landlord (1970), Ashby was given the opportunity to direct. thus fulfilling that seemingly impossible dream he had 15 years ago. But now he had arrived and there would be no stopping him. He followed his initial critical success with Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1974), Shampoo (1975), and Bound For Glory (1976).

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That's a question that has been asked by almost everybody who has seen the film, and I wish I could answer it. I directed my first film in 1969, and at that time - even the two or three years before that - I cannot recall any serious conversation by individuals contemplating such a project, which is not something I'm particularly proud of, because I never instigated it either. But. understand, the possibility of a film about Vietnam was never thrown at me. Another interesting question is why have they suddenly begun to explore that area, because in addition to our film, there are a number of others coming out. Maybe Hollywood is bothered by their conscience, maybe they feel they side-stepped it. It's a very interesting question and I wish I could give a definite answer as to why. I mean, I even asked myself the same question when I decided to do the film.

Yes. I was active in as many things as I was able to deal with, none of them being enough - you know, there was just the pressure of keeping the pressure on, and the frustration of knowing that nothing was enough. I marched around and said what I had to say. It's very interesting because Los Angeles, if for no other reason than the geography of it, is usually passive and not willing to get involved in causes. But there was a great deal of activity there in the '60s. For example, if Nixon, or others like him, came into town and stayed, say, at the Century Plaza, the people came down and they protested, they made their views known. People became united, they walked hand in hand with each other, and that was wonderful. In a sense, however, the only thing that was not so wonderful was the reason for this unity - and that was the war.

Once I commit myself to a project, my main objective is to collect as much information as I can about the subject - even though much of it will be wasted and go down the tubes. In this instance, it meant spending time with the writer and reviewing whatever research he had done. I also hired a couple of research people. I even got my secretary and the girl I live with into the music of the '60s and I had them put every song that they could think of, and every song that I remembered fondly, on cassettes. They filled six of them.

Then I assembled the photographs I had collected and pinned them up on the wall of the room I do a lot of my work in. And to help me remember the period, I borrowed many films from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and I saw Frederick Wiseman's Basic Training. I just want to be like a sponge and absorb everything; that's my form of research. And at a certain point in doing this, I became very depressed (this usually happens just before or after I start shooting) because I realize that I'm only going to capture a small part of that period. You know, unless you're doing a documentary film, there are certain physical limitations that you must adhere to.

I think that doing a large amount of research gives you the edge, because if you've got that detail covered and are constantly working on it, those mistakes you make don't hurt as much. And I'm going to make mistakes I'll be unhappy with, to the extent that I will work on something else. But the research gives your film a base of reality and honesty. So that when those mistakes are made, you can look at them in a different way.

I think that Nancy Dowd was the first writer with Jane on the project. I never met her, and quite frankly I don't understand her having a screen credit, because her story was not used. I'm a stickler about credits. I don't like it when people use a contractual agreement to put their name on a film, especially when they've contributed nothing to a film. But, at the same time, I understand a lot of people contribute to the development of a project, and Dowd did work with Jane. However, I didn't know anything about her screenplay until six weeks into pre-production, when someone sent me another script by Nancy Dowd and mentioned that she did the original screenplay on this. I just answered, 'Oh, really'. And I asked Jerome Hellman, the producer, about it and he said, 'Oh, yes, there was something done'. And I said, 'I've got to read that screenplay.'

So I read her screenplay, which was called Buffalo Soldiers to see if I could use anything from it. And I can't begin to tell you what it was about. It took place somewhere in Wyoming, and the woman was married to a sergeant who went to Vietnam and came back as a paraplegic. There was nothing in it that bore any resemblance to the structure Waldo had. And when I asked him about it, Waldo said he didn't care for that screenplay, but liked Jane's concept so much that he asked to do an outline. It was that 65 page outline, which took him about six or seven months to write, that convinced United Artistes to finance a screenplay; then when that was completed, they gave the go ahead to find a director.

Before I became involved, John Schlesinger had backed out of the project, and so I called him to ask why. Did they just decide they didn't want him? And he said something funny. He said, 'It's so American that I don't think I could do it ' I said, 'Well, John, you do pretty good films about Americans.' What he meant, he said, was that the Vietnam subject was so American, he didn't want the film opened to the kind of criticism where somebody could say, 'What right has he to do it!' And in one sense, I understand his feelings about that. But if I was in that situation and the question came up, I would say that I have the right simply because it's there. But John felt strongly about that and he recommended they give it to me.

Waldo had done what I consider breaking the back of the story. Now, I don't know how close it was to Jane's ideas, but it had the feeling of what I wanted. He had this woman married to a Marine captain who was going to Vietnam during the Tet offensive. And while he was away she goes to work as a volunteer in a hospital, meets this paraplegic, there is a love affair, and the husband comes home. But that concept changed a tremendous amount because I felt Waldo's script had too much rhetoric in it. I felt quite strongly that these should not be articulate people maybe they really couldn't find the words to say what they were feeling. And as we were working on the screenplay, Waldo had a slight heart attack which limited his working time, and we had to start at a certain date because Jane was committed to do Pakula's film, Comes a Horseman, which was already put off for about a month and a half so we could slot this one in.

I remember that just before we started shooting, Jane said to me, 'Have you ever started a film knowing no more about what we're going to do than this?' And I said, 'No.' She looked at me and said, 'I hope it works.' I said, 'So do I.' But I felt that because we were dealing with personal relationships in the film, the very fact that we were in limbo in certain areas would enhance it - we would be able to get deeper into the characters by not having the scenes worked out in advance; we might even discover things we wouldn't normally look for. So I felt pretty good about that, even though I knew it was going to be hard. There's enough problems in making a film without having to take that load and put it on top of everything else.

During the first two weeks of shooting, I had Rudy Wulitzer, who's a writer, working on the screenplay. I could come home at eleven at night and we would work until about two in the morning. I don't know what material I used or didn't use from what Rudy wrote, but just the fact that he was from outside the production helped me a great deal. I had a big problem with the actors because they would say, 'When are we going to get some pages.' And I would say, 'I'm going to give you a whole bunch in about ten days or two weeks.' But it really ended up, 'What are we going to do for tomorrow,' or, even, sometimes, 'What are we going to do today.' But like I said. I think overall it helped give the film that sense of reality and honesty.

The one place where the picture stretches the melodrama is, obviously, towards the end, when the three characters confront each other in the same room. I felt that even though we were pushing the melodrama, it was necessary to get those people together. People don't confront their responsibilities when it comes to dealing with others, and I wanted to put that on the screen, because that's what people should do, no matter how painful it is or how scared they are. Voight said, 'I'd never do that, and this character would never do it.' I said, 'I know, Jon, but we're going to do it because that's what he should do.'

Somebody's going to get killed. Absolutely. But I'll tell you a story: I've known Bruce for a long time, and while I knew he's totally opposite from his screen image - he's a very gentle, kind, sweet man - I never knew he abhorred guns. We were in Hong Kong shooting the gunnery range scene, with Dern shooting the targets, etc., and you couldn't talk to him that day. All he said was, 'I hate guns.' It's funny because I thought Bruce knew all there was to know about guns. But I ended up showing him things. Mind you, I don't own any guns and never have. But my father collected them and so I learned how to use them. It wasn't until I watched some guys kill a deer that I decided it wasn't for me.

If there's one thing I do regret - and I don't really regret it - but it would have been interesting if we could have structured the Marine captain's part more evenly or given him more screen time, so that we would have learned more about him. I liked what Bruce was doing with the role - obviously, it was the more difficult one, and I felt he brought humanity to this character.

Here's what happened with that: I have a very close relationship with Jack Nicholson, both as an actor and friend, and it would be very hard for me to imagine any male role that he couldn't do. So I thought he would be right for the paraplegic, and I spoke with him about it. I don't really try to sell him, I just say, 'Jack, here's what I've got, would you be interested?' Then, I thought about Bruce or Jon for the other role - and I chose in my mind to give it to Jon first; just how I arrived at that I don't remember. The very next day Jon came to me and said, 'Believe me, I will do anything in this picture. I would be glad to play the captain, but I would prefer Luke.' And I spoke with Jon about it (we didn't know each other very well and he was nervous about being with me) and said, 'That's interesting. Let me think about it for a bit. But you can be sure that I'll have a role for you.'

Now, I went back to thinking about Bruce more strongly. This is one of the things I hate about casting, because you're dealing with people and not two blocks of wood. But when Jack couldn't do it because of prior commitments, all my problems were solved, and I gave the part of Luke to Jon and that of the captain to Bruce.

During the debating period in my mind of whether he was going to play the captain or not, Jon met a Marine captain in a coffee shop and he asked him (this was on tape) 'what he would do if he came home from Vietnam and found out his wife was having an affair with a paraplegic. He said 'I'd kill both of them. I'd kill her first because he's in a chair and wouldn't be as dangerous.' And all this, mind you, was before Jon even got the role. But as soon as Jon knew he was going to play the part of the paraplegic, we got him a wheelchair and he practically lived in it. He went out and met different paraplegics. He played basketball with them, and they took to him right away.

Yeah. The only actors playing paraplegics were Jon and the guy with the ventriloquist's dummy. All the rest were para and quads. Everyone of them; not an actor in the bunch.

Absolutely. In fact, they're actually more up than we are. No matter what their accident was, when they found out they were paralyzed for the rest of their lives, they got into some very heavy thoughts about ending it. But once they've made the decision to go on living, they become very positive thinking people.

Normally, during the course of making a film, people start moaning and groaning, because of the time it takes to set up a shot. But these people were very patient; not once did they complain. It's one of the only times that I can think of where I've been around 50 or 60 people for six weeks at a time and liked every one of them.

I felt very obligated to treat them full out as people - and that's why I don't show them complaining about their handicap. I think the only time Jon talks about being in a chair is in front of Jane's house that one night where he says, 'When I dream I still see myself walking.' I felt we had to touch upon the dreams that these people have.

I know. But none of them has said very clearly what they didn't like. I thought it was pretty interesting - and it moved me a lot.

I didn't think it was too pat. I didn't say that Luke and Sally would definitely get back together. All I was trying to say was that this Marine wasn't strong enough to handle it. And that's pretty honest, I think. I'm not saying that every Marine captain couldn't handle it, but that this particular one couldn't.

Right. The last line in Waldo's script was a line I loved. I think Luke said, 'You know, fuck this being alone shit,' and they walked into the house together. But I couldn't bring myself to do that because I felt, Jesus Christ, first they have an affair while her husband is in Vietnam, and now, fortunately, he gets himself killed and they can be together. I didn't want the story to go that way.

She was concerned about it; about her image and what people might say. In other words, she felt that people would say, 'I always knew that's what she did running' along with the Black Panthers like she must have ...' But she didn't do that, and I understood her feelings. I explained to her that those people were going to say it regardless of what's on the screen. As a matter of fact, my attitude was: if they come to a Jane Fonda movie at all it would be fortunate. She's outspoken but still basically a shy person. So we had that to worry about.

She has also maintained her career throughout the years. Usually, when someone becomes politically active and controversial, their popularity drops - even if they've won an Academy Award. But that never happened to Jane. I don't think I ever heard anyone say she would be too controversial for a role. And in Hollywood they are outspoken about matters such as that.

Well, I always knew I wanted to use music from that period, but I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do it. And when I got into the editing of the picture, I got a lot of questions about that from people who are into doing films in a conventional manner. I will say that if we had the money it would have been wall to wall music. I would have started it right over the UA logo and maybe even put a good disc-jockey in there now and then, like it was one big radio station playing. But I did the next best thing, which was to put in as many songs as I could. I concentrated on where they started rather than where they stopped. And that had to do with a number of thoughts I had, the first one being that music was very important during the '60s, and if there was anything that could set that period better than almost any image that I could put on the screen, it would be the music. The other reason is that I believe people drift when they watch films. They may watch a certain scene and be so taken in by it that they are halfway into the next scene before they realize it. And I think that's a very natural thing to do. I certainly do it, and I'm certain a lot of others do too. So I left that if they're going to drift, let them drift off into something that they did in their own life. Let them hear something and say, 'Wow, that really takes me back to a certain place.' Then they can come back into the flow of the picture. They're not really going to miss that much.

The ultimate hope, of course, is that if they enjoyed it so much, they'll come back for the parts they missed. Unfortunately, the cost of seeing a movie makes that prospect unlikely. I love the format of film, but it would be great if they could buy the film on a record or disc and play it on a console at home five, six, twenty, or a hundred times. And maybe you become so addicted to one sequence that you play it over and over again. Nothing would be more exciting than that, and it gives people a chance to see all the things you tried to do in the film.

I would hope it wasn't, because I think he did a fine job in it. And if that were the case, it would mean that audiences prejudged it, which I guess happens all the time. But I think it's more of a question of timing, where if a film came out a year or two earlier or even later than it did, it would have a better shot at making it - provided it's a good film to begin with. I don't know how to answer it except to say that it has to do with the mood people are in and what their interests are, etc. What I try to do with my films is not be too heavy-handed with them. And sometimes I think that has a lot to do with it, because if you are heavy-handed you sometimes stand a little better chance of grabbing an audience. But I don't want that to ever be my guide.

When I started the film, I said, 'I just want to think of Woody as an interesting character. I don't want to get into his physical look, and so forth.' But after two weeks of research, I felt the actor had to look like Woody: he's got to be short and have that hair; etc. So I went through a whole period with that. In the meantime, I was meeting actors and recording artistes. My casting director said that David's manager, a man I had known for many years, called and said David really wanted to talk with me about doing the Woody Guthrie role. I knew he was a good actor because of what I had seen, but I heard he was bad to work with, that he was irresponsible, and that he was morose. But I thought it was someone who might be putting a lot of thought to how Woody should be played, so I set up a meeting. David didn't, however, come in that way. He brought his guitar in, he sang his own songs, he never sang a Woody Guthrie song. But we spoke, and in the end what he was saying wasn't so much that he studied Woody Guthrie and felt he could play him, as it was people he knew had told him for years that he should play Woody Guthrie. And the more I got involved with what the spirit of Woody Guthrie was, which was his family and beliefs, the more David came closer to that than anybody else I met with. I got resistance along the way from people because of David, because of the Kung-Fu television show and all the adverse publicity surrounding him. When I met him he was a man who had been living with Barbara Hershey for seven years, they had a baby, and they had broken up. So of course he was morose.

No. UA is exceptionally good for a film-maker in my estimation because they really do make it clear that it's up to you. I asked their because I do want to keep them enthused about the picture, and in the end they're the ones who have to sell it. But it was made very clear to me that I didn't have to ask them anything. It was the same on Coming Home. Of course, they would have liked a bigger name than Voight for the role, but when I told them I was adamant about having him, they agreed and let me make the picture.

I just felt that to cover his entire life would make the film less good. It took us two hours and twenty-seven minutes to cover what we did; any more than that would be another picture.

Again, I put a lot of photographs from that period on my wall - photographs by Walter Evans and others. And, of course, there was a tremendous amount of other material on migrants available. We used the original research books from 20th-Century Fox's The Grapes of Wrath, which told of that particular period when migrants came to California. That incident we show in the film when the Los Angeles Police set up barricades two or three hundred miles away from the border to keep people out of the state of California was not, to the best of my knowledge, in any of Woody's writing, except maybe a song. It came out of the research we did.

Enormous. We kept on looking and looking for locations. And my production designer, Michael Haller, who's normally a very calm human being, became agitated. I don't know how many thousands of miles he drove - and he had other things to do. I told Michael very early on that I didn't want to make any high shots looking down at the ground. That's what everyone does on a period picture because you can cut out a lot. I wanted everything to be at eye-level. And it's difficult to say, 'Let's go outside and start shooting 1937.'

It doesn't affect it other than just knowing basically what pieces of film will cut together and what the composition should be. It's very important that the singles, or the over-the-shoulder masters, be basically the same size, because if some-thing throws you off, you're limited by the amount of coverage you got. So, as a general rule, you have to be very careful about that. Most cameramen will pick that up - that's why they're always to the actor. But as far as pre-cutting the film in my head, I never have. I always shoot more film than I'll ever need. I prefer to edit that way.

In my mind it doesn't hurt the film. I would rather be frustrated by having too much material than not enough. There's obviously many, many times when I say, 'My God, why did I shoot that?' I mean, everything was working very good and I didn't need any more material. But I'm just going to let it ride along. I don't even question that. You just go with what you think is best.

When I first showed the picture to UA it was three hours long, and they genuinely liked the film and were moved by it. Now, when it came down to my end process, my assumption was that they would want a shorter running time so that the theatres would be able to get more screenings in. And it also said in my contract that I would deliver a two hour picture. I don't pay much attention to those things, but I let them have it because it doesn't really have to do with anything real. However, I did think that they would want a shorter running time on the film. So I ended up with a version that worked very well and ran two hours and fifteen minutes. But when Arthur Krim and Pleskow saw the film again they talked about scenes they missed, scenes that emotionally affected them. They were scenes that I liked, but I never expected them to want the film made longer. So I re-investigated it and changed around the beginning of the picture. But UA made it very clear that if I was satisfied with the shorter version, it was fine with them.

In the shorter version, the opening scene was the square dance and dust storm. I put back into the picture the scene where Woody Guthrie comes into the gas station and they sit around and one guy comes up with the cards - the fortune-telling scene. That scene was originally out. He just came up to the gas station and sat around with the guys and said, 'You folks sure are depressing.' Another scene I put back in was when he got the lady to drink the water. A scene that was questionable, but I put it back in anyway, was when Randy Quaid comes to the radio station and talks about standing up for his rights. I've never been quite sure about that. Randy's a good actor and he does the scene wonderfully but it just upsets me.

Once, when I was working as an assistant editor on a film, George Stevens came up to me and said 'In film, 25 per cent of it is in the writing ,25 per cent of it is in the shooting, 25 per cent of it is in the editing, and the last 25 per cent is what you end up with.' Making a movie is an horrendous undertaking. You can't lock yourself into anything. It's an ongoing process from the time I say I will do a film until the time I hand the distributor the cut film. The danger to me is if you fight so hard to put it down exactly the way you visualize it, and I've seen this happen, you bend it and bend it into something it isn't anymore, just because you've got something about it in your mind. If a scene vaguely represents what I had in mind, I'm happy as hell. The more latitude you give yourself, the better your chances for a good film. It's very personal, and I don't know how anyone feels about this other than myself.

Warren and I were just becoming friends and during dinner one night we talked about different ideas and he asked me if he had ever mentioned Hair which was Shampoo's original title. He didn't call it Hair he just described the story. He said he and Bob Towne had worked on it when they were doing Bonnie and Clyde and that when Towne had finally written the script and given it to him to read, he was so angry with it that he sat down the next day and wrote his own version. I read both versions, and I told him I thought it would make an interesting film because of the interactions between the characters. And he and I sat down and we took pages from each one just to get an overall idea. Then we got Towne to come in, and we sat for about, I guess, 17 or 18 days, almost 24 hours a day, in this hotel suite, trying to get a first draft of those two scripts together.

I was the director of the film and I had as much control as I have on any film. Beatty would exert a tremendous amount of influence on everybody because of what he felt about the film, and so forth. But everybody does that. And we had Towne around all the time. All I care about is what I'm seeing every day at the dailies. I don't care how we get it. I really liked working with Warren. There was never any power struggle on the film, because I would walk away from it in two seconds.

I think it's probably due to a number of things, the first being the kind of black humour that's in the film. I also think that a lot of it has to do with what Ruth Gordon says about life and love in the film. That's the impression I get with the feedback. It's not that she said such profound things in the film, as it is maybe the way she said them. And the spirit of the film makes people laugh. They have a good time with it.
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In D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, a contrast is made between the impotent Sir Clifford Chatterley, confined to his wheelchair, and the sexually active gamekeeper Mellors, who has survived World War I intact. In The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), the hero returns from World War II to find that his wife is unfaithful and he falls in love with the daughter of one of his comrades; another veteran returns to the same town with artificial hands and eventually realizes that his fiancee still loves him, even in his maimed condition. In Coming Home the sergeant crippled in the Vietnam War is not only more sympathetic than the cuckolded officer, but he is also more sexually effective and more politically active.

As so often in Hollywood films, abstract issues are embodied in a choice between characters who represent particular attitudes and values. Sally has to choose between a man (Luke) whose body has been irreparably damaged by Vietnam (but whose spirit, with her help, has been restored) and a man (Bob), whose physical wound rapidly heals, but whose spirit cannot accommodate his disillusion with the virtues of patriotisnn. She appears to vacillate between passionate involvement in her love affair, in which she finds full sexual satisfaction for the first time, and feeling that wifely duty is paramount and that her husband's needs must take precedence.

In thus representing the divided soul of America, she possibly loses some of her dramatic credibility - a liberated woman, not tied by having children, would perhaps not so readily resume her chains as Sally does. Sally remains at first uncommitted to her affair with Luke, though he earlier spotted her desirability and potential availability despite - or because of - her prim hairdo and rather long mini-skirts. She is not at first aware of making a choice between her absent husband and a present friend. Much later, with the affair well established, she still thinks that she can give up her lover and resume her marriage when her husband returns. She is clearly deceiving herself and anyway her husband can no longer find a use for her love, even before the FBI reveals her infidelity to him.

Sally's friend, Vi, also has a choice, though a less clear-cut one: her boyfriend Dink is with Bob in Vietnam; her brother, physically undamaged but psychically injured - fatally so, as it turns out, since he injects himself with a massive overdose - is confined to the hospital. Vi refuses to go to Hong Kong with Sally when Bob and Dink are on leave, because it would mean parting from her brother for five days. But after Billy's death, she agrees to marry Dink, even without seeing him again since he went to Vietnam. Compared with Sally, the terms of duty and pleasure are reversed for her. Her duty ties her to her brother, victim of Vietnam: her pleasure draws her to Dink, the active combatant still busy killing in the war.

In both cases, the man representing duty dies by suicide, releasing the woman for her pleasure. In this sense the upshot of the film is more ambiguous than it seems. It does not actually end with Luke addressing the high-school students, warning them against enlisting for Vietnam, or with Bob swimming towards the horizon, but with Sally and Vi at the supermarket behind a door marked 'Lucky OUT'. The women's dilemmas are resolved for them - the men's deaths could be seen as a 'lucky' solution to their problems. Perhaps the point is not so much choosing whether to be for or against the Vietnam War as recognizing that war is a man's game played at the expense of women as well as themselves. This is not a new perception in America. What is new, and possibly arising out of the women's movement, is the stress on women's pleasure rather than on their pain: orgasm rather than bereavement.

Sally is the pivotal figure in the film and Jane Fonda was crucially instrumental in getting the film made. It is difficult not to see in it some autobiographical significance for her. In 1968, she was still married to Roger Vadim and, apart from Cat Ballou (1965) and Barbarella (1968), most of the roles for which she is now best remembered were yet to come. In that year of intense political activity, she became conscious that America's role in Vietnam was questionable or worse. From that year dates the activist involvement that would eventually lead her to Hanoi, to a second marriage - with Tom Hayden - to notoriety and harassment. No other American woman of reputation, not even Joan Baez. She won an Oscar for Coming Home (as, justly, did Jon Voight) and it is a tribute as much to her commitment as to her acting skills. Though the film has been criticized as oversimplifying the complex issues of Vietnam, its sincerity is unquestionable and its tendency to melodrama in resolving its central relationship is the price of popular art.
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