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Tue Dec 15 15:09:26 1981
Pennies from Heaven
BC-MOVIE-REVIEW-PENNIES
By VINCENT CANBY
c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service
   NEW YORK - The place is Chicago and the time is 1934, the year of
the Chicago World's Fair that celebrated ''a century of progress,''
though the country was then in the midst of the greatest economic
depression it had ever known.
   Arthur (Steve Martin), a young man who frequently wears a
cartoonlike grin spread across a benignly empty countenance, is an
unsuccessful but enthusiastic peddler of sheet music, a dreamer who
believes in the singular optimism of the words of the popular songs
he sells. Life, to Arthur, is a bowl of cherries. If one waits long
enough, the clouds will roll by and one may well see a dream walking.
Love, he believes, is good for anything that ails you.
   Arthur, clearly, is doomed.
   Herbert Ross's ''Pennies From Heaven,'' which has nothing to do with
the old Bing Crosby movie but which is adapted by Dennis Potter from
his very successful BBC series of the same name, is a stylized,
sometimes neo-Brechtian comedy-melodrama with music, about poor
Arthur's cheerful decline and fall in a rotten world he refuses to
recognize.
   At bleak moments, such as the time the bank refuses his loan to open
a record shop, Arthur shuts out reality by escaping into a huge,
Busby Berkeley-like production number. Arthur and the bank manager
lip-synch the lyrics to ''Yes, Yes, My Baby Said Yes, Yes,''
surrounded by a couple of dozen chorus girls who tap-tap-tap away and
toss about large cardboard coins, forming geometric patterns against
the Art Deco set.
   At another moment, when Arthur and his mistress Eileen (Bernadette
Peters), a once-innocent virgin-turned-streetwalker, are watching
''Follow the Fleet,'' they leave the grubby movie theater to enter
the screen, taking over from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the
classic ''Let's Face the Music and Dance'' number.
   ''Pennies From Heaven'' is full of such startlingly bold and risky
transitions, the sort that work more smoothly on the stage than in a
film. Some of them are spectacularly effective, such as the sequence
in a roadside diner in which Arthur's dinner companion, an enigmatic
bum (Vernel Barneris) known only as the Accordian Man, suddenly
breaks into an extravagant rendition of the title song, which he
dances amid a deluge of prop-pennies, against a photomural collage of
Depression America.
   However, I'm not sure that I know what all this adds up to. From
start to finish, I watched ''Pennies From Heaven'' with what might be
best described as baffled interest. There's something briefly funny
and lunatic when Arthur, in a moment of dopey passion, breaks into
''I'll Never Have to Dream Again,'' lip-synching Connie Boswell's
voice, backed by the original period orchestral arrangement. Yet the
merciless eye of the camera and the film's deliberate pacing drain
all real wit and spontaneity from the sequence.
   People who saw Potter's BBC series, which was shown on PBS, report
having been enchanted by its offbeat mixture of comedy, melodrama and
pop. Not having seen it, I've no idea whether Ross and his
collaborators have made a delicate concept too literal, whether
they've overwhelmed it with Hollywood production values or, perhaps,
whether they've perfectly recaptured a quality that, to me, seems
labored and arch.
   The fun should come from the extreme contast between Arthur's
romantic daydreams and the awful realities of his life, which would
include his nagging wife, Joan - beautifully played by Jessica Harper
- whose usual disapproval becomes a mere surly pout when she's
feeling kind. The problem is that Ross's picture of Depression
America - of the unfortunate Eileen's progress from schoolmarm to
prostitute, of Arthur's sudden arrest and trial for a murder he
didn't commit - is no less broadly romantic than the elaborately
staged daydreams.
   All of the musical numbers are good, and a couple are great,
reflecting the interests of Ross and Nora Kaye, his co-producer (and
wife). If movies could be stopped, Barneris would stop ''Pennies From
Heaven'' with his diner-dance, as would the most surprising sequence,
a lowlife song-and-dance ''Let's Misbehave'' featuring a furiously
athletic performance by Christopher Walken. Miss Peters is funny and
charming lip-synching Helen Kane's ''I Want to Be Bad,'' and Martin
is something of a revelation as a dance-man.
   The movie, though, is not easy to respond to. It's chilly without
being provocative in any intellectual way. Unlike Brecht, the people
who made ''Pennies From Heaven'' don't seem to have anything
political in mind. It's simply an eccentric show, but it is one, I
suspect, that will become something of a cause among people who like
to go to movies at midnight.

nyt-12-10-81 1631est
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n096  1959  10 Dec 81
BC-REVIEW-''PENNIES''
(Newhouse 014)
Film review, suggested for use when ''Pennies From Heaven'' opens at
local theaters
By RICHARD FREEDMAN
Newhouse News Service
   (UNDATED) The fanatical loyalty of Steve Martin's myriad adolescent
fans will be sorely tested by ''Pennies From Heaven,'' the least
festive holiday offering since last Christmas' ''Popeye.''
   For ''Pennies From Heaven'' takes its Depression setting literally.
It's far more depressing than the basically affirmative ''Whose Life
Is It Anyway?'' even though the latter is about a suddenly paralyzed
sculptor who wants to die.
   The Depression itself, of course, produced such ebullient musicals
as the 1938 Bing Crosby ''Pennies From Heaven'' (no relation beyond
the title) and the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicles. As Andrew
Bergman observed in his classic study of the movies of the period,
''We're In the Money,'' people needed to be cheered up, and Hollywood
saw to it that they were.
   But here we have the glum saga of Arthur (Steve Martin), a Chicago
sheet music plugger unhappily married to priggish Joan (Jessica
Harper).
   On the road he meets Eileen (Bernadette Peters), a winsome
schoolteacher. Believing in the American Dream, as exemplified by the
lyrics of the songs he peddles, Arthur falls in love with Eileen
while hitting up his wife for the money to open a record store.
   He also meets such stock figures of Depression pathos as a
stuttering street-corner accordian player (Vernel Barneris) and a
blind waif (Eliska Krupka) straight out of the Little Orphan Annie
comic strip.
   Bearing his child, Eileen is fired from her job and soon falls into
the clutches of a slick procurer (Christopher Walken) who does a
diabolical dance on the bar of a sleazy saloon. She adopts ''Lulu''
as her nom de guerre and takes to the streets while Arthur faces a
bum murder rap.
   If these cheerful doings were handled as camp, there might be some
excuse for them. But director Herbert Ross treats them with all the
grim seriousness he managed to bury ''Nijinsky'' in, and Martin,
desperately trying to make an acting breakthrough from the
non-dimensional role he played in ''The Jerk,'' succeeds only on
being The Slob.
   Two innovations make ''Pennies From Heaven'' at all bearable. The
first is the use of some 16 actual recordings of the '30s - somewhat
souped up - for elaborately choreographed set numbers in the Busby
Berkeley manner.
   With Martin and the others lip-synching the words, we get such gems
as Bing Crosby's ''Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?'' ''Life Is Just
a Bowl of Cherries,'' Fred Astaire elegantly crooning ''Let's Face
the Music and Dance'' to Ginger Rogers, and Helen Kane, the original
Boop-boop-a-doop Girl, coyly proclaiming ''I Want to Be Bad.''
   All are a joy to hear.
   Credit for the second innovation must go to associate producer Ken
Adams and photographer Gordon Willis, who have managed to approximate
the ''look'' of the '30s with astonishing evocative power.
   But these occasional goodies can't offset the basic failure in tone
that makes ''Pennies From Heaven'' the tedious extravaganza it is.
When Eileen accuses Arthur, ''You killed off my old life,'' and he
bitterly replies, ''That's right, blame me,'' we realize they're
deliberately mouthing the cliches of the period, but they're
insufficiently stylized to achieve any aesthetic distance from it.
   So we're never really sure how to take Martin's character. Is he
meant to be one of those doomed believers in the American Dream like
Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths or Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby? Is he there to
show that a corrupt heart beats within The Man In the Arrow Shirt ads
he's made up to resemble? We never know and, before long, cease to
care.
   The film's reputed cost of $20 million will buy more pennies than I
can count, but the ones in ''Pennies From Heaven'' are made of pure
lead.
   X X X
   FILM CLIP:
   ''Pennies From Heaven.'' A glum, leaden musical starring Steve
Martin as a song-plugger in Depression Chicago and Bernadette Peters
as the girl he ruins. Wonderful period songs and decor help, but not
enough. Rated R. Two stars.
RB END FREEDMAN

nyt-12-10-81 2300est
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