Herbert Ross‘s Pennies From Heaven, a big-studio adaptation of Dennis Potter’s original BBC musical drama, opened almost exactly 40 years ago — Friday, December 11, 1981.
I was a huge admirer of Potter’s 1978 original presentation (critics adored it), and my reaction to the Ross (which I reviewed for The Film Journal) was something along the lines of “as remakes go this is truly a brave and striking effort, and almost as good as the BBC version. I adore many of the musical sequences, but something feels wrong…it’s a film about how grim and draining and merciless life was for so many during the Depression, yes, but it’s also a kind of heavy-sauce mood trip, almost a horror film…a feeling of walls closing in.”
Ross and Potter’s versions were pretty much identical. A struggling Depression-era loser named Arthur Parker (played by Steve Martin in ’81, Bob Hoskins earlier) lives in a fantasy retreat of popular songs in order to keep his spirit going and endure life’s constant misery. The contrast between the harsh reality of Arthur’s actual life vs. the the dreamworld songs that fill his head (and those of costars Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken, Jessica Harper and Vernel Bagneris) either moved you or sank you, but how could anyone fail to admire the audacious concept?
I’ve always been a fan of what Pennies From Heaven was about and how it got there. Brave and highly inventive, honoring the Potter while advancing its own signature, etc. Martin and Bernadette Peters were excellent. The black-and-white homage to a Fred Astaire + Ginger Rogers dance number in Follow The Fleet was pretty great, as I recall. I remember being extra impressed by Walken’s big dance number. But I haven’t once re-watched it over the last four decades. Not once.
Because somewhere around the halfway or two-thirds mark Pennies From Heaven drops a pill into your system that feels more dispiriting than anything else. It keeps leaning in the direction of despondency, death and doom. It’s a movie that says “most of us are rats on the treadmill, and the game is totally rigged against us so you may as well resign yourself to the endurance of it all…in all likelihood the only respite you will experience with any regularity will be in the realm of fantasy.”
Lars von Trier‘s Dancer in the Dark (’00), which I’ve seen three or four times, used pretty much the exact same premise. This time Bjork was the tragic and incorrigible daydreamer who, like Martin and Hoskins before her, ended up on the gallows.
Pennies From Heaven was a bust — $22 million to produce, $9.1 million in theatrical revenues. My pet peeve was the way Bagneris’s accordion player was initially portrayed as another sad but sympathetic loser, and then he turns out to be a rapist and a murderer of a young blind girl. Bagneris seemed like a weirdo to begin with, and for some primal reason I was repelled by the idea his character turning into a secret maniac, and of Martin being convicted for Bagneris’s crime…this was my big drop-out moment a la William Goldman.
Could Netflix or Amazon or Hulu be persuaded to fund a remake today? Or a similar musical tragedy with the same basic premise?
82 year-old Fred Astaire on Ross’s film: “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. As is it’s just froth. It makes you cry it’s so distasteful.”