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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 23920
Released: July 27, 2004 |
| Our Price: $3.00 |
| Used Price: $2.95 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
During the Great Depression, a married sheet-music salesman falls in love with another woman and uses cheery songs from that era to imagine a better life for himself.
Description of Pennies From Heaven:
Steve Martin plays Arthur, a '30s-era traveling sheet-music salesman whose marriage is bleak and who embarks on a fateful affair with a teacher (an amazing Bernadette Peters). Arthur's dreary world is juxtaposed with Busby Berkeley-styled musical production numbers that showcase Martin's and Peters's versatility. Arthur's world is desperate, sad, and only the more so when directly compared to the musical numbers. But it does work and it is affecting.
This dark, yet simultaneously ebullient film written by Dennis Potter is capable of presenting such polar-opposite visuals and emotion. Until this film, Martin was best known for his comedic albums, and for 1979's The Jerk. In other words, Pennies' disappointing box office can be accredited to audiences' inability to accept a dark Martin in the early 1980s. If Martin's dancing ability comes as a surprise, an even greater revelation is Christopher Walken in a sexy stripping tap-dancing number. Bob Hoskins played Arthur in the 1978 British miniseries of the same name. --N.F. Mendoza
Pennies From Heaven Reviews:
A total waste of 8 dollars 
2009-11-27 - I've been a fan of Steve Martin since I was a young teen. It was a good thing I never saw Pennies from Heaven until last month. Steve has done a lot of good work over the years that can tend toward the weird side. But, I never really minded that. Did you ever see L.A. Story? Anyway, even L.A. Story had some redeeming qualities.
Somehow, this movie just made Steve seem creepy. MGM was smart to bury this one. It's not an undiscovered treasure; it's was a waste of 8 dollars.
Herbert Ross's masterpiece 
2009-07-24 - I was one of the very few people who saw "Pennies from Heaven" in its initial release in 1981. What I saw transformed my idea of what a movie musical could be. I was seeing nothing less than an archetypal musical tragedy, more daring and distinctive than even the original musical tragedy, "West Side Story."
Much of this has to do, of course, with author Dennis Potter's extraordinary screenplay, by turns ebullient and wrenching. It may be as effective an evocation of the hardships of the Great Depression as any historical artifact. But equally important is the brilliance of director Herbert Ross, who took this schizophrenic story with its phony happy ending and brought cohesion to it all with craftsmanship and superior production values. It is unlike any other film he did, and it's sometimes hard to believe this came from the same man who directed tripe like "The Turning Point."
Everyone involved took risks with this film and rose above themselves, knowing how very special this idea was. But quirky and offbeat musicals still have an uphill battle finding acceptance, even today. As we near the post-Sondheim era of musical storytelling, for all of its pioneering innovations, people still have trouble with unconventional or downbeat narratives. That is the greatest pity. It isn't "Pennies from Heaven" that failed its audience, it was the audience that failed "Pennies from Heaven."
My All-Time Favorite Movie"
2009-06-20 - "Pennies from Heaven" is my all-time favorite movie. I love the music and the quirkiness of the story. I only wish there was a soundtrack CD available.
Pennies From Heaven
2009-05-24 - For me the performance of Vernal Bagneris doing the title song in this 1981 film with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters was the highlight of an imaginative, and very beautifully filmed movie. His rendition of the song was truly a masterpiece, with assistance provided by the Production Crew. He managed to deliver the song's message in such a way that I felt spiritually uplifted to a considerable degree by the recognition of the point of view that however bad circumstances may be, the true state of affairs from whence we all came, will eventually return. Why isn't Vernal Bagneris better known, and gotten the recognition and appreciation he deserves?
Hilarious, Innovative Musical Numbers; But Depressing Story 
2009-04-06 - Man, did I love the musical numbers in this film.....but hated the story. I wound up taping just the music segments out of this film and making myself a neat little half-hour video of fantastic song-and-dance numbers.
The dance numbers are 1920s-1930s material except you get 1980s color and special-effects (and loose sexual mores). Actually, these are more like put-ons of those routines, including Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. Added to the routines are humor. I just laughed out loud at the absurdity of them, which included having the actors lip-sync to the old-time singers.
The dance routines are all totally different and very entertaining, from the opening bank skit, to the kids in the classroom to Christopher Walken's striptease to Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters imitating Astaire & Rogers. The dancing is good and the songs are great: catchy and fun.
Story-wise, Martin ("Arthur Parker") plays a boorish, profane, lying and just plain unlikeable character. Are we supposed to root for him? Maybe we are to root for Peters, who plays "Lulu," the school teacher-turned- prostitute (sounds like real-life these days with all the female teacher sex scandals). Hey, I like Martin in a lot of films. He can be a very entertaining guy, but the character he plays in here.....well, you can have him and this very cynical and depressing story. No thanks.
It's no surprise to me it bombed at the box office. Too bad, because with a more appealing story a lot more people would have been treated to the great musical numbers in this movie.
