Tie Me Down! (1989), High Heels was especially attacked on moral grounds, notably by certain women's groups. Almodóvar also complained that Miramax, the film's distributor in the United States, did not understand the film and had no idea what to do with it. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 53% based on 15 reviews, with an average rating of 5.6/10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 51 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote that "High Heels has no real mirth and not even enough energy to keep it lively." Critic Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, commenting that "Pedro Almodóvar's films are an acquired taste, and with High Heels I am at last beginning to acquire it". Accolades High Heels received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and Goya Award nominations for Costume Design, Editing, Make-Up and Hairstyles, Sound and Supporting Actress (Cristina Marcos). The film won: 1991 César Awards as Best Foreign Film 1992 Sant Jordi Awards for Best Spanish Actress Analysis The film, which Almodóvar eventually made, was not that which he had intended after completing Law of Desire in 1986. The intended film would have been a variation on the classic play The House of Bernarda Alba by García Lorca, and would have been set in rural Spain, not in Madrid. The story would have involved a domineering mother and her two daughters, both of whom leave home in order to escape her tyranny; the mother is subsequently thought to have perished in a fire, but continues to pursue one of the girls for fifteen years. The proposed film did not come to fruition, for a variety of reasons. Almodóvar turned instead to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown which could be conveniently shot in Madrid. When he eventually made High Heels, it was fundamentally different from his original idea. Only the title remained. The plot was developed around the idea of someone confessing a crime on a live television news bulletin. High Heels relates to the American tradition of melodrama and the so-called 'woman's picture'. Imitation of Life (1959), directed by Douglas Sirk, was a major influence and there are some striking parallels between High Heels and Sirk's film.