Movies about the Iraq war are dying at the box office, as an article in the New York Times noted this week. The Valley of Elah, Rendition, Lions for Lambs and now the MTV-produced Stop-Loss have each sunk without a trace as audiences stayed away in droves. Now Lionsgate is trying to break the spell with The Lucky Ones, a stateside road picture modeled on Hal Ashby’s Vietnam-era The Last Detail and despite high marks from critics who’ve seen it, the producers are understandably trepidatious.

The president of the studio is quoted saying “nobody’s going to movies that look like homework”; people are sick of war (as polls indicate); and those who might want to see a film about it are leery of having it all explained to them by Hollywood liberals like Susan Sarandon (the mother of the slain soldier in Elah), Meryl Streep (Lions) and Sarandon’s husband, Tim Robbins, one of the stars of The Lucky Ones. Though it could also be that people just want a happy ending.

The 1973 Last Detail was not a hit. It got good reviews (notably for Jack Nicholson’s memorable performance as Navy Sgt. Billy “Bad Ass” Buddusky: “I am the motherfucking shore patrol!”) but ended on a dire note, in keeping with those dire times. Though the script (by Robert Towne) never mentions Vietnam, the war’s shadow falls over its doomed characters, and informs their hatred of the military. It was Ashby’s 1978 Coming Home that connected with audiences. It was a classic wounded-soldier story, a romantic-triangle film and a hell of an advertisement for cunnilingus.

It was also made three years after the war ended and no one needed convincing that Vietnam had been a fiasco, and taken a terrible human toll. With no end in sight, the war in Iraq is one rabbit hole a lot of moviegoers would rather avoid — especially on a date night. (Might I suggest more cunnilingus?) But without the draft, the nation faces a different divide than the one that existed over the Vietnam war. How many people do you know who have served, or have children who have served? The Iraq war is, in part, a class issue, as demonstrated daily by the candidates who oppose it but must dance around the delicate issue of the brave men and women who etc. It’s not their kids who are dying.

Maybe when this mess is finally over there will be some Coming Home equivalent, or even better: something along the lines of William Wyler’s immortal post-WW II film, The Best Years of Our Lives. That film managed to do the impossible: cross class lines, heal broken families and even make Americans take a hard look at soldiers with missing limbs, and contemplate their own loss. Maybe somebody could just try and remake that film. I see Bob Dylan in the Hoagie Carmichael role…