I've just returned from seeing "One From The Heart" in the theater. My wife and I have loved this film for years, having first seen it on the hard-to-find VHS tape, and later on the even harder-to-find LaserDisc. Over the years we've probably watched it more than two dozen times, and we were eagerly awaiting our chance to see it in 35mm.<br /><br />We were heartbroken. This is not a restoration - this is a desecration. The wonderful flow of the film was broken right at the begining. The stunning opening shot - through the "Golden Nugget" sign, down to the street, over the cars, outside the window, through the window, following Teri Garr as she talks to Lainie Kazan to a close-up of Teri looking in a mirror that cross-dissolves into Frederick Forrest looking into a mirror at his workplace and a great scene with Forrest and Stanton is chopped off right outside the window! We were jerked out of the picture, and thought there must have been a reel mixup.<br /><br />No. Apparently Coppola had taken all the criticism to heart and decided to try to please all the people who hated the film by making it more conventional. The result will please nobody. The new scenes are gracelessly edited in with painfully conventional cross-cutting between the storylines, and the lyrical dance/seduction of Teri Garr by Raul Julia is completely chopped up for no readily apparent reason.<br /><br />It's as if someone decided the mirror sequence in the Marx Brother's "Duck Soup" needed to be broken up by a love scene with Zeppo.<br /><br />The new scenes aren't all bad. In their defense, they make some elements of the plot clearer - the anniversary gifts in particular. And the scene in the car afterwards is interesting. But I would have prefered to have seen these scenes as DVD extras, and to have a DVD copy of the film I have on LaserDisc.<br /><br />I'm sure these scenes could have been added without restructuring the entire film. This is one of those films that will not appeal to everyone, and this attempt to do so has wrecked the magic that it had.