Chilly Scenes of Winter

Written and directed by Joan Micklin Silver from Ann Beattie's first novel, this film has one of the odder distribution histories in American cinema. John Heard plays Charles, a depressed civil servant in Salt Lake City, and Mary Beth Hurt plays Laura, the coworker who left him to return to her husband. United Artists' marketing department disliked the original title and released the film as Head Over Heels, a name the producers had actually suggested as a joke they assumed would be rejected, and the studio took the joke seriously. The director objected and the cast and crew sent the studio a rare collective petition in protest. That version ended happily, with Charles coming home to find Laura in the kitchen, and it died at the box office, taking just seventeen thousand dollars across a two week New York run. Three years later the studio rereleased it under the novel's original title and changed the ending: the kitchen scene was cut entirely and replaced with an ambiguous close in which Charles accepts the relationship is over and walks alone through a park. The director summed up the change as turning the film from boy gets girl into boy gets over girl. The rerelease outgrossed the original's entire two week run in a single week. Film noir icon Gloria Grahame plays Charles's mother. Who it's for: Admirers of 1970s American independent film that treats post breakup obsession honestly. Who it's not for: Not for viewers wanting a conventional romantic comedy, since the film stays stubbornly inside a man who has not recovered.