At the heart of this up-to-date private eye caper is the question, Whatever happened to the student radicals of the Sixties? And the several given answers are not lacking in humor, nor in sentimentalism for the good old days of peace marches, SDS meetings, and such. That one of these radicals, a Berkeley alumnus named Moses Wine, has turned into a standard seedy private eye implies that left-wingers are as susceptible as anybody to the romantic and melodramatic fantasies of the detective genre, or at least it implies that such fantasies are stronger and longer-lived than any passing political fancy; of course, Marxist private eyes are no more alien to the genre (see Hammett) than are reactionary ones (see Spillane), although all private eyes, left and right, traditionally come from perfectly straight backgrounds, like rank-and-file police duty, and not from campus riots. The case here, tailor-made for Moses Wine because it lets this dormant activist fight for the reputations of a Jerry Rubin and a Cesar Chavez type, involves a political conspiracy as loony as any since The Manchurian Candidate suggested the right-wing movement in America is actually a Communist façade. The plot moves along at a nice clip; only afterwards, on analysis, does it fall to pieces. With Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Anspach; directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd