I haven’t had a chance to rewatch this, but I’m about to be away from the computer for a couple days so I thought I’d at least open up the discussion so the rest of youse can talk amongst yourselves till I get back. Please keep your voices down. Twickster, you’re in charge. Take names.
Pennies from Heaven
Herbert Ross, 1981
Written by Dennis! Frickin! Potter!
This movie doesn’t work, but I’m still a huge fan of it because I’m a huge fan of Dennis Potter, who wrote the single greatest thing that ever happened on television, anywhere,* The Singing Detective.*
The point of this movie, insofar as there is one, seems to be that real life is less pleasant than the fantasy life of movies and popular songs. Well duh, that’s why you buy the ticket.
All of the performances are brilliant, the art direction is incredible, the direction is probably Herbert Ross’s best, and the writing is, well, Dennis Potter. But the one-note nature of the subtext is so unrelentingly brutal that you’re eventually just kind of happy that the thing ends. Still, it speaks pretty clearly to the depressive in me, and I’ll always have room for it on my shelf.
(Will try to respond in more detail in a couple days, when I’ve had a chance to rewatch it.)
I came in here misreading the title and thinking this would be a discussion of the old movie “The Five Pennies” with Danny Kaye starring as jazz great Red Nichols.
I watched it again last night. Though I’d remembered there was a big contrast between the story (such as it was) and the musical numbers, I’d forgotten how incredibly depressing the story was, and how wonderful and loving the musical numbers were. Similarly, though I’d remembered Christopher Walken had a great number, I’d forgotten it was a strip-tease.
I watched the 20th-anniversary discussion (Steve Martin, Jessica Walters, Bob Mackie, the art director, etc. – with not a single mention of Bernadette Peters ), and someone mentioned how much Pauline Kael liked it (Pauline Kael, boys and girls, was the extremely influential movie critic for “The New Yorker” for many, many, years), so I looked for her review. Being an old-fashioned girl with a book of her collected reviews, I looked there and not online. Let me excerpt it:
She’s clearer about her reaction than I am about mine. Like our last movie, New York New York, it’s a director’s labor of love, his fanboy recreation of a particular era of the movie musical – the '30s for Ross, the '40s and '50s for Scorsese. Like our last movie, the director interweaves contrasting scenes of authenticity to the era with a more modern/realist sensitivity. (Bernadette Peters’s character really, really likes sex.) Like our last movie, the experiment wasn’t entirely a success. [BTW, in the anniversary discussion mentioned above, the only film it was directly compared with was – NYNY.]
I preferred it to NYNY for a couple of reasons: for one, it wasn’t painfully overlong. For another, the musical numbers involved a lot of dancing, including a lot of tap. The choreography was wonderful, and a lot of the numbers were just incredibly delightful.
Of course, the singing was to original recordings, and not done by the actors – which apparently disqualifies it as a “real” musical, according to something someone (lissener or ArchiveGuy, I think) said in one of these threads recently. Hearing the vintage recordings is a little disorienting at first, esp. since the very first number has Steve Martin lip-synching to a woman’s voice. I quickly got used to it, though, and overall thought it was a successful way of increasing the period feel of the film.
Liked it, didn’t love it – and am glad we’re finishing up the obsessive fanboy portion of the scheduled movies.
Watching it again, I’m struck by how closely it parallels some of the early masterpieces of Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the greatest of all world filmmakers. (Here’s a good overview, in a recent NYTimes article about a new box set.)
Now, I’m saying this movie any way approaches the masterpiece status of these movies. But it’s interesting (well to me at any rate) that it covers similar thematic territory. I’ll ponder some more and decide if this is worth elaborating on. . . .
I’m just watching the Walken scene, and I’m reminded of Ugetsu, a movie in my lifetime top 3 movies of all time. In it a man deserts his wife and child because he really, really wants to be a samurai. She is eventually driven to prostitution in order to survive.
It makes me wonder if *Pennies *could’ve been saved by a better director.
Lissener, did you ever see the earlier BBC mini series of Pennies From Heaven with Bob Hoskins in the lead role? How do you think it compares? I’ve only seen parts of the movie version but I liked the mini series version a great deal, although there are other Dennis Potter plays I enjoyed more.
That’s what I came in to post - the mini series (available as a box set) lasts for about 6 hours and explores the themes in so much greater depth than a 90 min movie ever could. It was filmed where I grew up using local non-acting children too.
It is a sad tale, toying with Potter’s typical themes of reality and illusion, childhood and adulthood (Bob Hoskin’s character Arthur is pretty naive), love, sex and anger. The musical interludes are fascinating and, again with typical Potter amiable clunkiness contrast the dark plotline with fairy story fantasy.
The most intriguing aspect for me is the relationship between Arthur and the ‘Accordian Man’, who certainly seem to be two sides of the same coin, leading to the dreadful conclusion of the series. This never really comes out in the film, although the characters are played surprisingly well.
), and someone mentioned how much Pauline Kael liked it (Pauline Kael, boys and girls, was the extremely influential movie critic for “The New Yorker” for many, many, years), so I looked for her review. Being an old-fashioned girl with a book of her collected reviews, I looked there and not online. Let me excerpt it: