Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters Lip Sync in ‘Pennies from Heaven’: A Musical for the Bleak and Bawdy
On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.
Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.
The Pitch: Christopher Walken Gets to Dance and Steve Martin Sings… Sort of?
Known for his BBC TV series “The Singing Detective,” starring Michael Gambon, and “Pennies from Heaven,” which launched the career of Bob Hoskins, British journalist and screenwriter Dennis Potter seemed to have a fascination with the music trapped inside our inner beings. Mixing fantastical musical sequences with harsh dramatic realities, Potter used spectacle to expose his characters’ complex natures, as well as the complex nature of the world around them, with biting wit and stunning inventiveness. When his work arrived on the big screen, however, American audiences weren’t exactly ready for his murky blend of joy and sadness.
After watching the TV version of “Pennies from Heaven,” director and choreographer Herbert Ross (“The Goodbye Girl,” “Footloose”) recruited Potter to adapt his show into a major motion picture — eschewing the original London setting for Depression-era Chicago and transplanting comedy mega-star Steve Martin into his first dramatic lead role. The adaptation wasn’t easy. Potter reportedly went through 13 drafts before landing on one that worked, and MGM wouldn’t let the BBC show the original series again for a decade. In the end, the film was a major box office flop. Despite critical praise and an Academy-Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay (“Pennies from Heaven” is also counted among Martin’s own favorite performances), the singular midnight movie musical from 1981 has never received the recognition it deserves.
Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
Starring Martin as Arthur, a down-on-his-luck sheet music salesman married to the shy and unhelpful Joan (Jessica Harper), our light-footed and flawed hero dreams of living the kind of life expressed in the songs he tries to sell, but he’s got no mode of attaining it. To punctuate the shift between reality and desire, Ross and Potter infuse classic songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s, like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “Love is Good For Anything That Ails You,” to showcase the fantasies Arthur and his two — yes, two! — leading ladies would rather be living. Eventually, Arthur meets and falls for schoolteacher Eileen (“The Jerk” co-star Bernadette Peters), engaging in an affair that ends with an illegal abortion arranged by a gangster pimp played by Christopher Walken. Sounds like a light musical romp, no?
While Walken gets to show off his classic dance training in the show-stopping “Let’s Misbehave,” it’s Martin and Peters who really make the film sing, crafting a doomed romance in the vein of “Bonnie & Clyde” but with characters who you actually want to see make it out to some kind of happy ending. I won’t ruin what ultimately happens, but it’s safe to say audiences didn’t fully appreciate the nuance it attempted to offer at the time. To view it nowadays, however, “Pennies from Heaven” plays as a knowing tale of how the music in our souls often plays in contrast to the reality of what’s around us. —HR
Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
The Aftermath: A Silent Standing Ovation for the Tragi-Fantasy
It’s sort of better that they don’t sing, isn’t it?
In the midnight movie space, it’s rarely the right call to have your actors do less, and with Martin and Peters in the cast, it can’t have been easy for Ross to pass up a chance to have the leading man from “Roxanne” duet with a legit Broadway legend. But in “Pennies from Heaven,” the lyrics left unsaid are precisely the point. This forgotten lip-sync tragedy captures the ultra-cinematic essence of longing by keeping its stars (mostly) silent for the songs — instead giving Martin only a few lines to sing-speak at the very end when we find Arthur on the gallows for a murder he didn’t commit.
Yeah, it’s heavy stuff, twinkle toes! That’s what “Pennies from Heaven” does so well. Where your standard genre fare might push emotion through scale-climbing ballads, this clever genre concoction presents the conflicting wants of Arthur, Eileen, and Joan through the atypical pageantry of new choreography set to old borrowed voices. It’s an especially fitting invention for a tale of adultery in which the guy really does leave his wife for the girl, and all three suffer for it. The Prohibition-era setting is apt too in an outing that once again sees the “Footloose” director lamenting what’s lost to the puritanical and, in the context of this particularly jazzy love triangle, asking, “Why can’t they all have it all?”
There’s a sinful core to some fantasies realized, a kind of self-actualized line that separates the lyrics we only mouth to ourselves from the ones we’d actually try belting at karaoke. Call it guilt. Maybe shame. Either way, that willingness to get over it and “go there” is talked about a lot in midnight movies, most often through the pearl-clutching lens of shock value achieved via sex and violence. Of course, scandalous feelings that are so big you can’t help but act on them shape musicals even more so, and as applied here, we see three star-crossed lovers quietly punished for experiencing their dramatic effects — even in private.
Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
Long before reality collapses in on the soul-searching Arthur, we see Joan and Eileen shaken by attempted fantasies gone wrong. Closer to a David Lynch joint than an evening with Gene Kelly, the scene in which Joan covers her nipples with lipstick at Arthur’s request, only for her philandering husband to reject her attempts at saving their bond anyway, is awful. Later on, as the “Suspiria” actress stares daggers at Martin, Joan stalks Arthur with scissors in hand and the words of “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” are piped through her lips. The revenge fantasy feels earned. But when the needle comes off the record — Dolly Dawn’s dulcet tones suddenly replaced by Harper’s shaky spoken voice — you realize what Joan can’t do just yet and there’s pain in the absence of plot.
Conversely, when Eileen-turned-Lulu first encounters Walken’s soft-shoed Tom (who, yes, is so stupidly excellent in this I watched his scenes twice), she’s pushed to deliver the fantasy just her presence at a speakeasy seems to suggest. Tom asks, “You’re not a tease, are ya? Because I’ll cut your face.” Coming off the hot-hot heels of the aforementioned “Let’s Misbehave,” it’s a cold splash of dialogue made more sobering by the realization that Tom — like Arthur — is also married. Even then, Eileen whispers, “Arthur…” and the visions of the pair’s “I Want to Be Bad” seduction bleeds into the next performance. As the snappy trio… her, him, and his wife… glibly perform “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” their unsung but plainly spoken turmoil worsens and Eileen’s tragic predicament as a woman who is reluctantly surviving off sex work comes to bear.
Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
What to make of that ending, after Eileen has the abortion and Arthur leaves Joan? Like a vague lyric that’s been intentionally left open to interpretation, at least two fantasies play out at the time of Arthur’s execution (although it’s narratively clear what has occurred). On the one hand and in reality, Joan is fully avenged. Her lies to the police help lead them away from that murderous accordion player (New Orleans theater legend Vernel Bagneris, by the way) and Arthur is blamed for killing that blind girl (Eliska Krupka) through no direct fault of his own. Imperfect a solution though it may be, Joan can sleep easier with the source of her heartbreak dead and his girlfriend left all alone.
At the same time, however, Arthur and Eileen want to be together and most audiences will want that for them too. They’re intoxicating as a pair, a silhouette of Fred and Ginger imagined in the shadow of your favorite retro album pressed into limited edition vinyl. Sprinting to Peters for an over-the-top “The Glory of Love” finale, Martin brings his whole chest to the line, “We couldn’t have gone through all that without a happy ending. Songs ain’t like that, are they?” The lovers embrace as the credits roll. They exit as tap-dancing testaments to the good and bad of fully felt fantasies, even as their “real” story ends in the worst imaginable loss and their love fades into a sour note.
Losing roughly $13 million at the box office, “Pennies from Heaven” played to a lot of empty theaters in 1981. My father recently recalled one such showing. He was 22 years old, seeing the movie with his brother and a woman who is not my mother. He told me he remembered dancing with his date in front of the screen when Peters and Martin got up and did the same for the meta “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” Describing a kind of infinity mirror of romantic possibility, it seems to be one of my dad’s fondest memories with a woman he no longer knows. As a matter of theme, it makes sense they wouldn’t work out… even if for just that showing, they sang and they danced and they did. —AF
You can rent “Pennies from Heaven” (1981) on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube, and Google Play. IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations at 11:59pm ET every Friday. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
