Pennies from Heaven (Hera Productions, SLM Production Group, MGM, 1981)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 18) Turner Classic Movies showed an intriguing film producer David Begelman, director Herbert Ross, writer Dennis Potter and stars Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters made at MGM in 1981: Pennies from Heaven, based on a BBC miniseries Potter had written in 1978. MGM hired Potter to do the adaptation himself but he was resentful at the sheer number of rewrites he was put through, and likewise the original stars of the miniseries, Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell, weren’t happy they were bypassed in favor of Martin and Peters. The film’s conceit is that Martin plays Arthur Parker, a salesman of sheet music of popular songs of the day (1934, in Chicago, where the setting was moved from Potter’s real-life home town, Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England), who lives in a fantasy life expressed in the lyrics of the songs he sells. Arthur is unhappily married to Joan Parker (Jessica Harper), but on one of his song-selling trips he meets the woman of his dreams, Eileen (Bernadette Peters), which is expressed with a sudden cut-in of Bing Crosby’s recording of “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” from 1933. That’s the strategy used throughout the movie, with songs of the period – sometimes in unchanged auditions of the original recordings, sometimes the originals with new parts overdubbed (the musical directors were Marvin Hamlisch and Billy May, the latter of whom had impeccable big-band era credentials, including a stint as arranger with Glenn Miller) ¬– cut into the action. The film was a box-office flop in 1981, grossing just $9 million on a $22 million production budget. Steve Martin explained it: “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. … Everything I had done until that time had been wildly successful, 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.”

It generated mixed reviews from major critics, with Pauline Kael of The New Yorker and Gary Arnold of The Washington Post raving about it, while Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader wrote, “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.” It’s hardly an original social commentary that the fantasies of the world sold in popular culture, especially popular songs, bear little or nothing in common with reality, but it’s quite well done here even though the device seems obviously the stuff of fiction rather than real life. Throughout the film I was whipsawed, sometimes loving the movie for the skill with which the old records are mimed by Martin (who’d never danced professionally before, but he learned how for this film and became quite good) and Peters (an accomplished musical performer on stage in shows like Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece, Sunday in the Park with George), and sometimes at least mildly annoyed by the whole conceit of the concept. Once Arthur becomes infatuated with Eileen, he tracks her down with all the intensity of either an actual bloodhound or a police officer nicknamed after one. He discovers that she works as a schoolteacher in a socially conservative small town, and she lives with a man who’s supposedly her brother but comes off more as her father. One night Albert comes to see her and accidentally lets slip a mention of his wife, but does a quick save by claiming she’s dead and he’s a widower. Naturally he adds to his lie that he’s never been interested in another woman since until he met her, and ultimately he manages to get it on with her even though her “brother” is in the next room. Unfortunately, it turns into one of those “infallible pregnancies at single contacts” the late David O. Selznick used to ridicule, and the moment he notices that she’s “with child,” the head of the school board, Mr. Warner (John McMartin), fires her.

Meanwhile Arthur has met a street singer (Vernel Bagneris) who plays accordion and sings hymns like “Rock of Ages” and “The Old Rugged Cross” (a song which confused me as a child because I couldn’t understand why anyone would cover a cross with carpeting) and a blind woman (Eliska Krupka), while Eileen, with no way to raise a child, arranges for an illegal abortion. She ends up owing $200 for the procedure to Tom (Christopher Walken), a slimeball who persuades her to become a prostitute as the quickest way to earn the money she “owes” him. Ultimately the accordion-playing street singer rapes and murders the blind woman, and Arthur is suspected of the crime. Meanwhile, though Joan correctly suspects that Arthur is having an affair, she agrees to put up the money she inherited from her father to fund Arthur’s start-up of a record store, since he’s reasoned that people no longer play instruments and now get their home music from records. Alas, he’s just a bit too early in the Depression for his business model to work; the record store fails and, in one of the film’s most bizarre scenes, he and Eileen let themselves into the store at night and smash all the records. Ultimately the police arrest Arthur for the blind girl’s murder and he stands at a gallows about to be executed. He recites the words to the surprisingly dark verse of “Pennies from Heaven” as he’s about to be hanged – but just then Eileen re-enters the scene and Arthur announces that with all of that, the film is going to have a happy ending after all. The Wikipedia page on the film says that’s supposed to be yet another dream sequence, though with my own desire for a happy ending I was hoping it meant that the authorities had found evidence that Arthur was innocent after all and he was going to be exonerated.

If there’s one thing Pennies from Heaven does right, it’s expressing the ironic contrast between how sex (and sexuality) were portrayed in the early-1930’s pop songs (at least the white ones; the Black ones were often a lot more honest about sex and its real-life consequences, both good and bad!) and the reality. We hate to see Eileen’s moral degeneration and degradation at the hands of both Arthur and Tom, and yet we also understand it’s the ironic consequence of a life lived too much in a dream world conditioned by pop culture. I have mixed feelings about Pennies from Heaven, and I was especially struck by the sequence towards the end in which Arthur and Eileen go to a movie theatre that’s showing the 1936 musical Follow the Fleet. During the big Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers number at the end, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” Arthur and Eileen walk on to the theatre’s stage (a lot of movie theatres had stages then, relics of the time when they had presented vaudeville acts between showings of the films) and join the dance. There’s also a chorus line of male dancers tapping their canes in rhythm, which didn’t exist in the original film. This reminded me of a film Steve Martin made three years later, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, a film noir spoof directed and co-written by Carl Reiner which undercut clips from classic gangster movies and noirs featuring such legendary stars as Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Alan Ladd. Fred Astaire, who was still alive when this film was made and had tried unsuccessfully to block the use of his old footage in it, said, “I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They don't realize that the '30’s were a very innocent age, and that [the film] should have been set in the '80’s – it was just froth; it makes you cry, it's so distasteful.” (Astaire’s widow, Robyn Smith, lobbied for changes in the copyright laws to allow a celebrity to copyright his or her “likeness” and thereby prevent reuses of it in this manner.) I found much of Pennies from Heaven dazzling and much of it dismaying, though it’s revealing that Astaire called the 1930’s “a very innocent age” when you would think he, having lived through them, would have known better.