January 24, 1996 (Sundance Film Festival)
August 23, 1996 (limited)
The Spitfire Grill (also known as Care of the Spitfire Grill) is a 1996 American film written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff and starring Alison Elliott, Ellen Burstyn, Marcia Gay Harden, Will Patton, Kieran Mulroney and Gailard Sartain. It tells a story of a woman who was just released from prison and goes to work in a small-town café known as The Spitfire Grill. The film won the Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, prompting several distributors to enter into a bidding war in response to the positive buzz, but when the movie was finally released, critics as a whole responded less favorably than they had at Sundance.
The movie was the basis for the 2001 Off-Broadway musical of the same name by James Valcq and Fred Alley.