People Next Door 2016 / Coming Home / USA 1978
When a US Marine captain is called to Vietnam, his attractive wife (Jane Fonda) suffers from persistent loneliness. But an encounter with a paraplegic war veteran (Jon Voight) turns her life upside down. The three-time Academy Award-winning drama focuses on the endless cruelty that war inflicts on the lives of innocent people even though the armed conflict isn’t presented in the movie.
When US Marine captain Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern) is deployed to Vietnam, his attractive wife Sally (Jane Fonda) suffers from persistent loneliness. Her life completely changes – but her behavior doesn’t exactly reflect Bob’s idea of what’s “proper” for the wife of a strong-minded Marine: moving from the base to a place near the beach, impulsively buying a sports car, and deciding to become a volunteer at the local hospital. Thousands of miles from the hell of Vietnam, as Bob is discovering the deceit underlying the sanitized news reports from the front, Sally meets a paraplegic war veteran named Luke (Jon Voight) who is wracked with depression and consumed by guilt. The dreamlike atmosphere and melancholy period soundtrack lend colour to the story of their growing friendship, a bond that is sometimes too intense; at the same time the movie eloquently expresses how nonsensical any kind of armed conflict seems to those it has so cruelly affected. Awarded three Oscars: Best Actors Voight and Fonda, and Best Original Screenplay.
Martin Horyna
127 min / Color, 35 mm
Director Hal Ashby
/ Screenplay Waldo Salt, Robert C. Jones
/ Dir. of Photography Haskell Wexler
/ Editor Don Zimmerman
/ Art Director Michael Haller
/ Producer Jerome Hellman
/ Production Jerome Hellman Productions
/ Coproduction Jayne Productions
/ Cast Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern
/ Sales Park Circus Group
Hal Ashby (1929, Ogden, Utah – 1988, Malibu, California), a representative of the New Hollywood generation, will be remembered for the movies he contributed in the 1970s to a key chapter in the history of post-classic American film. He gained recognition in the 1960s as an editor when The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) and In the Heat of the Night (1967) brought two Academy Award nominations. Then came the black comedy Harold and Maude (1971), the psychological drama The Last Detail (1973), the comedy Shampoo (1975), the biopic of folk singer Woody Guthrie Bound for Glory (1976), the drama Coming Home (1978), and the social satire Being There (1979), in which Peter Sellers shines brightly in one of his final roles. Although Ashby worked extensively in the last decade of his life, none of his final eight pictures made much of a splash worldwide.
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