Happy New Year, kids! Good news? Barbra Streisand's made it yet another 365 days. Bad news? So have I. Anywho.......ready for a think piece on one of the most underrated movies of all time? I'll take your submissive silence as a "yes".
PENNIES FROM HEAVEN
This is Fred Astaire's least favorite movie. He was reportedly livid that he couldn't prevent the homage to him that serves as the film's finale; "They don't realize the thirties was a very innocent age....it just makes you cry, its so distasteful", he griped. I wasn't alive back then, and thus can't fault the his comments, but I do think the man approached the picture incorrectly. It is not attempting to comment on an era. It's a film full of music and, at the core of its sad, sad soul,about music. With the utmost care and reverence, it performs a daring act of cinematic surgery, taking the sweet, spirited, piquantly hopeful heart of the best MGM song-and-dance stunners and using it to power a story replete with the icy blood of post-modern skepticism. It pits overblown optimism against burnt-out cynicism and forces us to consider the horrifying question; in certain circumstances, could the former actually be worse than the latter?
Told through lip-synced renditions of the Jolson-era music he peddles, this is the story of down-on-his luck song salesman Arthur (Steve Martin). Desperate to maintain his glass-half-full view of a world that seems to take peculiar interest in speedily disassembling even his smallest hopes and dreams, he begins cheating on his doormat wife Joan (Jessica Harper) with lustrously vulnerable schoolteacher Eileen (Bernadette Peters), setting off an intricate ballet of suspicion, jealousy, and sexual insecurity that climaxes with the two new lovers escaping to the Big City, a spur-of-the-moment excursion that they will pay for dearly; indeed before the curtain falls, the random unfairness of life and the subtle internal damages caused by deeply human failings will shatter all three characters' image of the ever-elusive American dream. Here is a movie that begins with a kick-line of chorines and ends with a midnight hanging.
Interestingly enough, much of the film's success can be attributed to those occupying two of the more obscure behind the scenes jobs. Let's start with the music researchers. When you're making a period picture, they're helpful. When you're making a picture about period music they are essential. Writer/director Dennis Hopper had a grand idea here, one that brilliantly bursts the confines of the typical movie musical and explodes the boundaries of what the form can do. InSingin' in the Rain or Bells Are Ringing or a hundred other mu-see-kal feelms, the characters sing jazzy little ditties when happy, weepy, string-soaked ballads when sad. Here, the characters use songs to comment sarcastically on their troubled existence. When Arthur is denied a loan, he launches into a frenzied rendition of "My Baby Said Yes!". As all three main characters hit their all-time low, they don sailor suits and strum guitars to the carefree tune of "Life's A Bowl of Cherries". Introducing irony into the most straight-faced of art forms is not easy. One misplaced song could've upset the dangerously delicate tone of the piece, and this bold experiment would have collapsed. Instead, Potter and his magnificent research team have plumbed the back catalog of Depression era music, unpacking forgotten curiosities ("It's A Sin to Tell A Lie") and refurbishing brassy classics ("Let's Misbehave"). In every song, the lyrics, rhythm, even orchestration (props to Marvin Hamlisch) all serve to comment on what our anti-heroes are going through. Note-perfect, indeed.
Snaps also to whoever had the cajones to sit down at a roundtable of battle-hardened, pea-brained studio execs and propose the following: "I want Steve Martin to play a calloused, deranged, adulterous loser!" At the time there existed a whole army of actors who drew huge crowds by playing calloused, deranged, adulterous losers-Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, hell, even Christopher Walken, who steals this movie in a spit-spot cameo as a raunchy young pimp. But Steve Martin? Fresh off The Jerk, the Iliad of slapstick pictures? Who would shill out the sheckels to see him as the very definition of a douchebag?
I'm sad to report the answer is hardly anyone. Pennies from Heaven was a stone-cold flop upon its release. Still, on DVD (where it's acquired a deserved cult following), it floors you just how wrong anyone else would've been for the part. Arthur's great flaw is his hopelessly inept vision of existence as musical comedy. He believes life, like the movies, guarantees a happy ending, no matter the missteps taken along the way-this is optimism as weaponry. Martin played similar characters for laughs in his previous features, but here, the primitive buffoonery is tamped down and tragically real. In Nicholson or Hopper's hand, the guy would've simply been an asshole-these actors are the dictionary definition of hard-boiled. Martin's manic energy-plus our knowledge of his career up to this point-transforms Arthur into such a crippled man-child that, even as he dallies with abortion, adultery and murder, we're damned if we don't feel genuine affection for the guy. There's a deeply unsettling scene where Arthur, deep in the ditches of social insecurity, lecherously persuades Joan to commit a sexual act of heinous perversity. Any other actor would bite down on this showboat moment like a ravenous bulldog. Martin tiptoes delicately around the obvious, playing it with the pathetic yearning of an attention-starved labrador.
Martin may power the movie, but he doesn't carry the whole thing on his shoulders; if we didn't believe the two women who serve as Arthur's main motivations, we wouldn't be sold on his actions. In a film where both female leads grapple with thoughts of depression, suspicion, insecurity, and even murder, Harper and Peters resist the urge to make their suffering glamorous; they recognize that, despite the Old Hollywood genes that compose a large part of the picture's DNA, these characters are not something out of a 30's matinee marvel. Peters in particular astounds; the cutesy mannerisms that permeated her early work are stripped away here, and her trademark sing-songy speaking voice, which has ruined many a role for her, actually works for the part, adding much-needed comic relief during the school scenes and compounding her already powerful sex appeal. You watch her in Pennies from Heaven and think to yourself that, with a little luck and a lot of direction, she could've been a much bigger screen star.
It's a shame this movie really bit it at the box office, but not a surprise. If you look closely at the specifics of the plot, you'll realize that the two big draws that would put asses in theater seats sort of cancel each other out. Those looking for a return to pre-WWII escapist cinema scoffed at the idea that elements of psychodrama and Greek tragedy could be introduced into that purest of movie genres. (See Astaire quote at the beginning of this piece.) And those out for insight into the minds of flawed, fascinatingly complex characters probably figured it wasn't worth sitting through those intolerably jazz-hand orgies to get to the tidbits of analytical insight. It's a damn shame, because for either group to miss out on this masterpiece is just about unthinkable.
Musical buffs; in addition to some impressively accurate imitations of Busby Berkeley's camera-friendly, shifting-shapes choreography, we also get a wholly original staging of the title number that's jaw-plungingly stunning enough to be mentioned in the same breath as Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain dance or Audrey Hepburn's gonzo ballet in Funny Face. Let's just say it involves a sizzling soft-shoe, a tricked-out diner, and hundreds and hundreds of cascading gold coins-so many that some of them remain scattered about the studio lot even today!
As for the psyched-for-psychology crowd, think of this movie as a brilliant mind game. It convincingly re-creates the Technicolor, studio-backlot musical milieu, then populates it not with gleaming glitterati but with the kind of embittered, quietly lost people who went to those old-fashioned movies-the kind who needed escape. It takes people who fill their heads with fantasies and places them in those very fantasies, where they realize that, when lived instead of simply imagined, their self-sustained Utopias collapse under the weight of their painfully acute humanity. Pessimistic, but not nihilistic. Hell, even a little hopeful in a way. Burlesque this ain't.
Indulge this weird comparison; when I listen to David Bowie's "Life on Mars", this movie always comes to mind. The song is about a little girl lost in the world of the movies, and the questions that form in her head as she loses herself in silver-screen bliss. "Is there life on mars?", she ponders. This movie has an implicit answer; "maybe we're better off not knowing, sweetheart."
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