Pennies from Heaven (1981 film)

The film was a commercial failure, grossing slightly more than $9 million at the box office against a budget of $22 million.[5]

Bernadette Peters as Eileen "brought a cocky attitude and a sexy exuberance to the musical numbers."[6]

When asked in Rolling Stone about the film's box office failure, Martin said: "I'm disappointed that it didn't open as a blockbuster and I don't know what's to blame, other than it's me and not a comedy. I must say that the people who get the movie, in general, have been wise and intelligent; the people who don't get it are ignorant scum."[4]

David Begelman, head of MGM, called it "the most daring film we made. It took all these different textures and molded them... I didn't make that picture because I enjoy walking a tightrope. I made that picture because with every honest conviction you can bring to bear, I believed that film could become a film of such incredible celebrity it would enjoy very wide success. I was wrong. I was completely wrong."[1]

It was Martin's second starring role in a film, following 1979's comedy hit The Jerk, and fans were confused to see Martin in a serious role. "You just can't do a movie like Pennies from Heaven after you have done The Jerk," Martin said in a BBC interview.

"Everything I had done until that time had been wildly successful," he recalled in 1987, "so that the commercial failure of the film caught me by surprise. I still think artistically it's a very good film. I've rarely seen a role that showed that kind of vulnerability in a man. It's a special film to me, and if I had to find fault, it would be that I think some of the music could have included more popular songs of the period."[7]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 82% of 28 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7/10. The website's consensus reads: "A complicated little musical, Pennies from Heaven is a dazzling, tragic spectacle."[8] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 64 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[9]

The film was given a rapturous review by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, writing "Pennies from Heaven is the most emotional movie musical I've ever seen. It's a stylized mythology of the Depression which uses the popular songs of the period as expressions of people's deepest longings—for sex, for romance, for money, for a high good time...there was never a second when I wasn't fascinated by what was happening on the screen."[10] Kael further noted that "The dance numbers are funny, amazing, and beautiful all at once; several of them are just about perfection."[11] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called it "a rejuvenating, landmark achievement in the evolution of Hollywood musicals, and certainly the finest American movie of 1981. A brilliantly enhanced distillation of a 1978 British television play, Pennies blends the astringent with the poignant and the fanciful. It appears as a belated Hollywood counterpart to Brecht and Weill's 'Three Penny Opera.'"[12]

Other contemporary reviews were less positive. Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four and called it "all flash and style and no heart."[13] Vincent Canby of The New York Times reported that he watched the film "with what might best be described as baffled interest." He wrote that "All of the musical numbers are good, and a couple are great...The movie, though, is not easy to respond to. It's chilly without being provocative in any intellectual way."[14] Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote "'Pennies From Heaven' is one of the most hopelessly esoteric big-budget Hollywood pictures ever made, a lugubrious, neo-Brechtian musical exercise of notable pretension and virtually no artistic payoff...In short, it's 'Penny Gate.'"[2] Dave Kehr of The Chicago Reader wrote that "ironic, alienating musicals have been tried before, but never with such lofty contempt for the form. [The film] drips with a sense of anger and betrayal that seems wildly out of scale to its cause - the discovery (less than original) that musicals don't reproduce social reality."[15] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "Martin ruins what could have been one of the year's freshest and most innovative films. With Martin hamming it up, 'Pennies From Heaven' is full of socko moments, but the entire film doesn't hold together."[16] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "it is like no other period musical. It is so far out, so unexpected, that it might well be described as experimental...As such, it's likely to elicit deeply divided reactions: Audiences will either love it or hate it."[17]

Peters won the Golden Globe as Best Motion Picture Actress in a Comedy or Musical for her role as Eileen Everson, a schoolteacher turned prostitute.[18][19] A review of the DVD reissue asserted, "Peters brought a cocky attitude and a sexy exuberance to the musical numbers."[6]

Fred Astaire, who was powerless to prevent the reuse of the footage from his film Follow the Fleet, detested Pennies from Heaven: "I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They don't realize that the '30s were a very innocent age, and that [the film] should have been set in the '80s – it was just froth; it makes you cry it's so distasteful."[20][21]

The film was nominated by the American Film Institute for its 2006 list of Greatest Movie Musicals.[22]