Pennies from Heaven (1981)

Directed by Herbert Ross. Starring Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Jessica Harper, Vernel Bagneris, John McMartin, Christopher Walken, John Karlen.

Steve Martin followed his first starring film role in The Jerk with another movie co-starring Bernadette Peters, but a wilder swing in the opposite direction is hard to imagine. The risky gamble is this: it’s a miserable Depression-era story of unhappy people living unhappy lives periodically getting whisked away into musical numbers where they lip-sync to popular songs from the time (“Let’s Misbehave”, “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?”, the title tune, etc.). The film offers a rich blend of the nostalgic and the crestfallen in Gordon Willis’ photography, the visual nods to several paintings (most prominently, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks) are as clever as they are dreamy, the performances from Martin and Peters are meticulous without being fussy, and the movie offers a nice showcase for Christopher Walken’s oft-overlooked dancing skill (despite a limited role). However, the acting only works in isolation, with little to no association among the characters as they drift helplessly toward tragic fates. For all of its technical achievements, the fantasy sequences serving as escapes from reality don’t work in correlation to the main narrative—the jarring effect is laughable, alienating instead of romantic or moving. If taken as pieces and a series of shuttered sequences, there’s much to admire, but it simply doesn’t hold together as either an end-to-end narrative or creative conceit. The script was adapted by Dennis Potter from his own six-episode 1978 BBC TV serial starring Bob Hoskins.

52/100