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Asri-unix.229 net.movies utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!mclure 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 ********** ------- 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

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