Pennies from Heaven
Director: Herbert Ross
Year: 1981
Rating: 8.0
Seeing this again after some 35 years I can see why audiences stayed away
in droves. I can imagine them thinking - oh it's a Steve Martin film - he
was so funny in The Jerk - and it's a musical - he is so great on the banjo
- this should be hilarious. And it wasn't. Not a laugh to be seen or found
- deader than a funeral home on a Sunday night. Depressing like being the
only person in a laundromat on a Saturday night. I can imagine them whispering
to one another - when does it get funny? Never. It just gets darker and darker
till you feel like you have been buried in your grave and the dirt is being
piled higher. But it is in its own unique way brilliant.
Herbert Ross the director and Martin take their love for 1930's musicals
and pay them tribute but turn them upside down and show the rotten core inside.
They are telling us - those old Depression musicals that always had happy
endings were lies - there are no happy endings - just moments - brief flashing
moments of happiness surrounded by failure and self-pity. Dick Powell, Ruby
Keeler, Joan Blondell, Fred Astaire - they were just unspooling fantasies
to the American people - times were hard - they needed dreams back then.
It is rather a remarkable film on that level - they never give in to musical
traditions that we have come to expect - boy meets girl - they fall in love
- they fight - and in a big finale they reunite and you know their love will
be forever. This is a seedy little tale of seedy little people whose lives
are drab and pointless - but it is all they have - so they keep yearning
for more but all the cards are stacked against them. Martin plays Arthur,
a salesman of sheet music to music stores - he has a frigid wife (Jessica
Harper) who he doesn't love anymore and is full of pent-up frustration. On
the road he falls instantly in love with a Eileen an innocent school teacher
(the always lovely Bernadette Peters) who he seduces and quickly forgets.
She doesn't. She is pregnant. And it just gets worse and worse. It is like
the gravity of fate is just pulling everyone down into suffocating quicksand.
There is no redemption. No happy ending. No lessons learned. Small acts of
cruelty litter the screen.
But within this depressing darkness are bright splotches of color and music
as the film will jump into a fabulous musical number that will take you outside
of the film - somewhere where there are happy endings. But they are all imaginary
- flights of Technicolor fancy. The choreography is terrific - Martin turns
out to be a fine dancer - Peters is of course a musical star and a guest
appearance from Christopher Walker as a pool hustler/pimp is a standout performance.
The odd thing though are the songs - all classics from this period - but
they are the originals with the actors just lip synching. It feels peculiar
and you kind of wish they had let the actors sing - especially Peters who
has a fine voice. So my guess is that audiences that lasted to the end of
the film came out thinking - what the hell was that and the word got around
- but I quite enjoyed it - just don't expect to laugh a lot. Or at all.
