Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams is a 1973 American Technicolor drama film directed by Gilbert Cates and written by Stewart Stern, starring Joanne Woodward, Martin Balsam, and Sylvia Sidney. It tells the story of a New York City housewife who rethinks her relationships with her husband, her children, and her mother.

Plot

Rita Walden is a depressed, middle-aged New Yorker. Always tired, Rita is prone to nightmares, and when she does dream more pleasant thoughts, they are of her childhood on the family farm. In her mind, she settled for second best when she married her ophthalmologist husband, Harry. She still thinks about what life would have been like with the older farm boy on whom she had a crush at age 12½. She is constantly bickering with her mother, her sister Betty, and her grown-up daughter Anna, who has issues of her own.