When Sally Hyde's (Jane Fonda) husband, a ramrod-straight marine captain, Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), is sent to Vietnam, she leaves the isolated world of the officer's quarters and begins volunteer social work at the veterans hospital. There her unthinking support of the war and her blindness to its effects are challenged by meeting the crippled men struggling to recover, psychologically as well as physically, from their time in country.

Many, like Luke Martin (Jon Voight), now a paraplegic, are embittered and full of unfocused, uncontrollable rage, which he takes out on the prim, controlled Sally. Interestingly, they went to the same large high school, but she was a pretty, popular cheerleader type and he was just a guy in the back of the class. Gradually, as she changes politically (always signaled by changes in hair and fashion) and he recovers emotionally, they become friends and then lovers. This causes a sexual awakening in Sally that furthers her transformation from a repressed wife to an independent woman. Then her husband comes home.

Hal Ashby's film, with its classic rock soundtrack and lush photography by Haskell Wexler, submerged its politics in a warm nostalgia, although it was made just a few years after the war ended. Still, its theme of individual transformation, both political and sexual, struck a chord with baby boomer audiences who all felt, to varying degrees, that they had done the same thing.

Directed by
Hal Ashby

Cast
Jane Fonda - Sally Hyde
Jon Voight - Luke Martin
Bruce Dern - Captain Bob Hyde
Robert Ginty - Sergeant Dink Mobley
Penelope Milford - Viola Munson
Robert Carradine - Bill Munson
Charles Cyphers - Pee Wee
Tresa Hughes - Nurse De Groot
Mary Jackson - Fleta Wilson
Olivia Cole - Corinne
Willie Tyler - Virgil

Production Co.
Jerome Hellman Enterprises
Jayne Productions

Produced by
Jerome Hellman
Bruce Gilbert

Studio
United Artists

Writer
Waldo Salt
Nancy Dowd
Robert C Jones

Music
John Lennon