The Marine Captain's wife, thinking to make herself useful while her man is away in Vietnam, takes a nonpaying job in the veterans' hospital. There, she undergoes a radical character change (symbolized by her going from straight hair to frizzy) and falls in love with a bitter wheelchair case who, at first touch, produces the fireworks always missing from her unecstatic, or at least unorgasmic, marriage: "It's never happened to me before," she breathes in post-coital heaven. (Which proves what? Paraplegics make better lovers? War protesters make better lovers?) The movie can spare no more time for the veterans' hospital once love blooms, which makes the heroine's volunteer work seem less motivated by do-gooding or consciousness-raising than by manhunting. And for that matter, the director, Hal Ashby, seems less interested in making a political movie than an old-fashioned triangle movie in which the characters' political convictions are simply cues as to whom the audience is supposed to side with. As in any old-fashioned triangle tale, the sticky emotional situation is eventually cleaned up with a convenient suicide. Hit songs of the 1960s are periodically played on the soundtrack, unabridged, and they almost drown out the action in this soft, pale-looking movie, photographed by Haskell Wexler with the Dust Bowl dust still on his camera lens from his stint on Ashby's Bound for Glory. Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, and Bruce Dern. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd