On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.
Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.
The Pitch: Christopher Walken Gets to Dance and Steve Martin Sings… Sort of?
Known for his BBC TV series “The Singing Detective,” starring Michael Gambon, and “Pennies from Heaven,” which launched the career of Bob Hoskins, British journalist and screenwriter Dennis Potter seemed to have a fascination with the music trapped inside our inner beings. Mixing fantastical musical sequences with harsh dramatic realities, Potter used spectacle to expose his characters’ complex natures, as well as the complex nature of the world around them, with biting wit and stunning inventiveness. When his work arrived on the big screen, however, American audiences weren’t exactly ready for his murky blend of joy and sadness.
After watching the TV version of “Pennies from Heaven,” director and choreographer Herbert Ross (“The Goodbye Girl,” “Footloose”) recruited Potter to adapt his show into a major motion picture — eschewing the original London setting for Depression-era Chicago and transplanting comedy mega-star Steve Martin into his first dramatic lead role. The adaptation wasn’t easy. Potter reportedly went through 13 drafts before landing on one that worked, and MGM wouldn’t let the BBC show the original series again for a decade. In the end, the film was a major box office flop. Despite critical praise and an Academy-Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay (“Pennies from Heaven” is also counted among Martin’s own favorite performances), the singular midnight movie musical from 1981 has never received the recognition it deserves.
Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
Starring Martin as Arthur, a down-on-his-luck sheet music salesman married to the shy and unhelpful Joan (Jessica Harper), our light-footed and flawed hero dreams of living the kind of life expressed in the songs he tries to sell, but he’s got no mode of attaining it. To punctuate the shift between reality and desire, Ross and Potter infuse classic songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s, like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “Love is Good For Anything That Ails You,” to showcase the fantasies Arthur and his two — yes, two! — leading ladies would rather be living. Eventually, Arthur meets and falls for schoolteacher Eileen (“The Jerk” co-star Bernadette Peters), engaging in an affair that ends with an illegal abortion arranged by a gangster pimp played by Christopher Walken. Sounds like a light musical romp, no?
While Walken gets to show off his classic dance training in the show-stopping “Let’s Misbehave,” it’s Martin and Peters who really make the film sing, crafting a doomed romance in the vein of “Bonnie & Clyde” but with characters who you actually want to see make it out to some kind of happy ending. I won’t ruin what ultimately happens, but it’s safe to say audiences didn’t fully appreciate the nuance it attempted to offer at the time. To view it nowadays, however, “Pennies from Heaven” plays as a knowing tale of how the music in our souls often plays in contrast to the reality of what’s around us. —HR
You can rent “Pennies from Heaven” (1981) on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube, and Google Play.IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations at 11:59pm ET every Friday. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
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