Pennies from Heaven

Bernadette Peters, Steve Martin, and Jessica Harper in a promotional still from Pennies from Heaven (1981)

Tonight's lineup on TCM is several movies incorporating tap dancing, including a new-to-me documentary kicking the night off at 8:00 PM. The night concludes early tomorrow at 4:00 AM (or overnight in more westerly time zones with Pennies from Heaven.

Steve Martin plays Arthur Parker, who lives in 1934 Chicago with his wife Joan (Jessica Parker). It's a marriage on the rocks, however, as there's a depression going on and Arthur's job as a seller of sheet music doesn't earn much. He's got dreams of owning a store of his own, but the only way he could do that is to use his wife's inheritance as collateral, something he's unwilling to do. So he leads a life of quite desperation, going around his territory in east-central Illinois.

One time out on the road he meets a couple of people. The first is a blind accordion player (Vernon Bagneris) who will become an important plot point later in the story. The second comes when he's trying to sell a store owner some sheet music. A teacher comes in looking for part songs for a children's choir, something that unfortunately Arthur doesn't have. But Arthur sees her from a distance and finds her beautiful, and knows that he's got to see this woman again, despite the fact that he's already married.

Arthur does a bit of research and finds that this teacher is one Eileen Everson (Bernadette Peters), who teaches at the local elementary school and lives in a farmhouse outside of town with her parents, she becoming a spinster. The two meet and fall in love -- and the feeling is mutual -- even though Arthur lies through his teeth about already being married. Still, the two are enough in love that they decide to have sex, and having sex just the one time is still enough to get Eileen pregnant, which of course is going to lead to problems between Arthur and Joan, as well as for Eileen when she loses her job as a result and goes out on the road looking for Arthur.

Meanwhile, Arthur runs into a nice blind girl by an underpass, but it's just a chance encounter. Later, the accordionist winds up there, and when the blind girl runs into him, the accordionist kills her. But there's circumstantial evidence linking Arthur to the scene, and once the police figure out he's got some sort of relationship with "loose" woman Eileen, Arthur is going to be in serious trouble.

The traditional, if you will, plot of Pennies from Heaven could have made a pretty good movie. However, the producers had a different idea in mind when they came up with this movie. That was to make an homage to the musicals of the 1930s, by having characters fantasize about escaping the Depression through 1930s-era stylized musical numbers, with the main actors mostly lip-syncing to the songs. The idea is something that reminded me of the movie The Boy Friend from about a decade earlier. I had problems with The Boy Friend, but I think the musical fantasy conceit works better there than it does here, in part because the "real world" setting of the earlier movie is a group of actors trying to put on a musical; inserting musical numbers into a backstage movie does make sense. Here, it really didn't work. It doesn't help that the early 1980s look at the 1930s looked too sterile, as evidenced by the photo above.

Pennies from Heaven was a commercial flop at the time it was released, and frankly, it's easy to see why. Even though I didn't particularly like it, I still think it's one that probably should be seen once, in part because there are people who are probably going to like the idea of using musical fantasy numbers to advance the story. Pennies from Heaven is also available on DVD and I believe Amazon streaming, so you can also watch it that way.