‘A Nice Idea’
Based mostly on Dennis Potter’s 1978 BBC miniseries of the identical title, Pennies from Heaven paints a wistful portrait of Mud Bowl period America, even because it provides the grimness a cheerful coat of Hollywood paint and gloss. Set in 1934 Chicago, the Nice Melancholy is in full swing once we meet Arthur Parker (Martin), a sheet-music salesman who already looks like time’s handed him by.
Going door to door to promote music notes to households extra possible to purchase a document or hearken to the radio, Arthur is visibly pigeonholed by everybody as a dreamer, together with his lengthy struggling spouse Joan (Suspiria’s Jessica Harper). But how little they understand that Arthur really lives a life fluttering between fantasy and actuality, artifice and despair. As a result of in his thoughts, Arthur is main one superb MGM technicolor musical. Being denied a financial institution mortgage in-person transforms in his thoughts into an elaborate faucet dancing quantity. In the meantime a bootleg rendezvous with the trainer he’s in love with, Eileen (Bernadette Peters), morphs into the pair actually residing a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical second on the silver display screen, full with black and white images, artwork deco units, and Irving Berlin music.
However whereas the movie is ostensibly a musical, not one of the characters truly sing: slightly they lip-synch to outdated recordings of Astaire and Rogers, or Bing Crosby and the Boswell Sisters.
The film needs to stay on each side of the cloud line, with the opening credit highlighting Martin’s title in old-timey lettering throughout an attractive sundown, after which descending after the title card beneath gloomy climate, revealing an oppressive storm entrance has set in earlier than the story may even begin. So whereas Arthur may imagine there may be nothing sinister about his affair with the candy college trainer in one other city, he’s deluding himself since she additionally turns into pregnant after which homeless. Again then, an single lady is shunned from locations of respectability and society—the very locations Arthur goals of conquering.
It clearly should finish poorly for Arthur, who lastly sings together with his personal voice (learn: Martin’s) as he reprises the titular “Pennies from Heaven” whereas standing on a gallows the place he’s about to be hanged for a homicide he didn’t commit. It’s an odd combination of sunshine and darkish which in 1981 Martin beamed to the press was “my first MGM musical” and moreover “my first dramatic position.”
Trying again at it 40 years later in Morgan Neville’s very good STEVE! (martin): A Documentary in 2 Items on Apple TV+, Martin ruefully recalled, “I assumed it was nice. The film has an ideal idea, lip-synching outdated songs. I liked it, and I assumed it was an enormous hit… and it flopped.”
