Pennies from Heaven (1981 film)

Plot

In 1934, Chicago sheet-music salesman Arthur Parker is having a hard time, both in his business and at home with his wife Joan. His business and marriage are failing, and Joan refuses to give him the money she inherited from her father to start his own business.

Arthur's dream is to live in a world that is like the songs he tries to sell. He is refused a bank loan, although he fantasizes that he gets it. In his travels, Arthur meets schoolteacher Eileen and falls in love with her instantly. They embark on a short affair, but Arthur leaves her and returns to Joan, who is desperate to keep him and agrees to give him the money he wanted. Arthur denies having an affair, though Joan is sure he is lying.

Eileen gets pregnant by Arthur and is fired. With nowhere to go, she takes up with stylish pimp Tom. While Eileen is attracted to Tom's "badness", Tom clearly means business, and arranges for her to have an abortion.

When Arthur meets Eileen again, she is now a prostitute calling herself "Lulu". They resume their romance, and Eileen leaves Tom and her sordid life. Impulsively, Arthur convinces her to run away together. Having failed to sell his business, Arthur and Eileen break into the store one night and trash it, smashing its phonograph records (except for "Pennies from Heaven"). To supplement their income, Eileen keeps prostituting in spite of Arthur's objections.

A blind girl whom Arthur knew superficially is raped and murdered by an accordion-playing hobo, whom Arthur had given a ride earlier in the film. The police's suspicions are confirmed by Joan, who reveals to them Arthur's sexual predilections to get back at him for cheating on her. The police find Arthur trying to leave town with Eileen, and arrest him for murder; he is soon convicted and sentenced to death. At the gallows, he recites the lyrics from the song "Pennies from Heaven". In one final fantasy, Arthur and Eileen are reunited, with Arthur saying, "We've worked too hard not to have a happy ending."

Cast

Production

This was Martin's first dramatic role in a film. He had watched the original miniseries and considered it "the greatest thing [he'd] ever seen". He trained for six months learning to tap dance. Walken trained as a dancer as a young man and he was able to use his dancing skills in the film.

According to a 1990 article in The Times, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had Potter rewrite the script 13 times and required him to buy back his copyright from the BBC, for which he paid BBC "something over $100,000". In addition, MGM prohibited broadcast of the BBC's original production for 10 years. Around 1989, at the prompting of Alan Yentob, the controller of BBC2, producer Kenith Trodd was able to buy back the rights from MGM for "a very inconsiderable sum." In February 1990, the BBC rebroadcast the original Pennies from Heaven serial for the first time since 1978.

In the same Times article, Trodd stated that Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell, the stars of the original series, "were terribly upset that they weren't considered for the film. I think they still blame Dennis and me in some way, but there was no way to argue the point with MGM."

The style of the movie balances the drab despair of the Depression era and the characters' sad lives with brightly colored dream-fantasy lavish musical sequences. The characters break into song and dance to express their emotions. For example, Eileen turns into a silver-gowned torch singer in her school-room, with her students lip-synching and dancing ("Love Is Good for Anything That Ails You"). Tom seduces Eileen with a tap dance/striptease routine on top of a bar ("Let's Misbehave"). Arthur and Eileen go to a movie (Follow the Fleet) and wind up dancing in formal wear, first with, then in, a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical number from the film, "Let's Face the Music and Dance". All the songs are lip-synched except Martin singing/speaking the title song at the end, but Arthur, Tom, and Eileen dance.

Four paintings are recreated as tableaux vivants in the film: Hudson Bay Fur Company and 20 Cent Movie by Reginald Marsh, and New York Movie and Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. Three of the four were painted after 1934, when the movie takes place, and all depict scenes in New York City rather than the Chicago setting of the movie.

Reception

The film was a commercial failure, grossing slightly more than $9 million at the box office against a budget of $22 million.

When asked in Rolling Stone about the film's box-office failure, Martin said: "I'm disappointed that it didn't open as a blockbuster and I don't know what's to blame, other than it's me and not a comedy. I must say that the people who get the movie, in general, have been wise and intelligent; the people who don't get it are ignorant scum."

It was Martin's second starring role in a film, following 1979's comedy hit The Jerk, and fans were confused to see Martin in a serious role. "You just can't do a movie like Pennies from Heaven after you have done The Jerk", Martin said in a BBC interview.

"Everything I had done until that time had been wildly successful," he recalled in 1987, "so that the commercial failure of the film caught me by surprise. I still think artistically it's a very good film. I've rarely seen a role that showed that kind of vulnerability in a man. It's a special film to me, and if I had to find fault, it would be that I think some of the music could have included more popular songs of the period."

The film received generally positive reviews, and currently has an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes with the consensus, "A complicated little musical, Pennies from Heaven is a dazzling, tragic spectacle." The film was given a rapturous review by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker: "Pennies from Heaven is the most emotional movie musical I've ever seen. It's a stylized mythology of the Depression which uses the popular songs of the period as expressions of people's deepest longings—for sex, for romance, for money, for a high good time...there was never a second when I wasn't fascinated by what was happening on the screen." Kael further noted that "The dance numbers are funny, amazing, and beautiful all at once; several of them are just about perfection."

Peters won the Golden Globe as Best Motion Picture Actress in a Comedy or Musical for her role as Eileen Everson, a schoolteacher turned prostitute. A review of the DVD reissue asserted, "Peters brought a cocky attitude and a sexy exuberance to the musical numbers."

Fred Astaire, who was powerless to prevent the reuse of the footage from his film Follow the Fleet, detested Pennies from Heaven: "I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They don't realize that the '30s were a very innocent age, and that [the film] should have been set in the '80s – it was just froth; it makes you cry it's so distasteful."

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

Awards and nominations