Minding the Gaps: ‘Head Over Heels’ / ‘Chilly Scenes of Winter’ (1979 / 1982)

Minding the Gaps is a recurring feature in which Keith Phipps watches and writes about a movie he’s never seen before as selected at random by the app he uses to catalog a DVD and Blu-ray collection accumulated over the course of the last 25+ years. It’s an attempt to fill in the gaps in his film knowledge while removing the horrifying burden of choice.

How badly marketed was the 1979 film Head Over Heels? A quick look at the poster provides the answer:

At first glance the movie appears to be about a couple that lives in fear of a menacing giant whose grinning head has unexpectedly emerged from snow banks around their picturesque A-frame. By contrast, here’s how the film was repackaged and resold in 1982, under its now better-known (and better) title, Chilly Shades of Winter.

At the very least, this is a less chaotic, if not particularly memorable, poster. Yet both ultimately fail at the task of trying to convey the feeling of Joan Micklin Silver’s strange, reflective, end-of-the-‘70s film, an adaptation of Ann Beattie’s 1976 debut novel Chilly Shades of Winter. Taking its cues from the film’s new, studio-preferred title, the Head Over Heels poster suggests an uproarious comedy awaits viewers. But the film’s 1982 poster doesn’t quite get it right, either. The tagline announces it as a “romantic comedy for all seasons,” but every other monochrome element says “brace for glumness.” 

So what is this movie if not a laugh-a-minute comedy or a brooding consideration of loneliness and alienation? It’s simplistic, but not entirely inaccurate, to say the film often splits the difference. Set and partly filmed in Salt Lake City, Chilly Scenes of Winter stars John Heard as Charles, a thirtysomething civil servant for the Department of Development whose job involves sitting in a featureless room and filing reports. He has no passion for it, but he’s good enough that he keeps getting promoted. As the film opens, he’s still heartbroken nearly a year after his break up with Laura (Mary Beth Hurt), a former co-worker who’s returned to her husband and stepdaughter. Laura and Charles became an item during that separation. 

An early exchange efficiently establishes how stuck in the past Charles has become. When Charles tells his best friend Sam (Peter Rieger) he’s prepared “Laura’s chili” for dinner, he has to confirm he means he’s used Laura’s recipe. “You had me worried,” Sam replies. “For a minute there I thought you meant Laura made the chili and it’s still in the icebox a year later.” It’s a needed clarification. Charles isn’t the sort of man who understands that not everything keeps forever.