Pennies from Heaven (1981)
Directed by Herbert Ross
During the Great Depression, a sheet music salesman seeks to escape his dreary life through popular music and a love affair with an innocent schoolteacher.
7 connections found
View:
7 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Pennies from Heaven to
Watching Gosling, usually cast as a cool, detached man of action in such films as The Place Beyond the Pines and Only God Forgives, glide gracefully past Angel's Flight or the Watts Towers reminds us of the way we felt when Christopher Walken was revealed, as a saloon-dancing gangster in Pennies from Heaven, to be a frustrated song-and-dance man.
Old Hollywood is as glorious and intimidating to these 21st-century lovers as it was in Pennies from Heaven when Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters danced in front of the flickering image of Astaire and Rogers, before entering the cinema screen themselves.Something similar happens in La La Land when Mia and Sebastian drive up to the Griffith Observatory after watching Rebel Without a Cause ; it’s as though the movie has spilled over into real life.
I suspect that Gyllenhaal’s favorite movie might be the same as my own, the bitterly nostalgic ’80s-does-’30s Steve Martin musical “Pennies From Heaven.”
He was known best for Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective, both of which were mini-series on UK television, both of which were period pieces mixing fantasy and reality, both converted into theatrical films in America.
Its jumble of movie references, witting or otherwise, include Pennies from Heaven, Metropolis, and Dick Tracy, as well as the James Whale classics Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein…
(The 1981 Steve Martin musical Pennies From Heaven shares the top spot, and they're more alike than they sound.)
This is a notion that has been explored before in such excellent films as the aforementioned “Brazil” and the even-more-underrated “Pennies from Heaven,” that strange and sadly beautiful Dennis Potter creation in which a Depression-era sheet music salesman sees himself as the hero of a series of elaborately produced musical numbers when the pressures and disappointments of real life became too much.
Advertisement
They balance each other wonderfully, and it doesn’t hurt that Marshall orchestrates everything else around them with near perfection: “Chicago” has almost single-handedly resurrected the tradition of the movie musical, a genre that has for the most part languished since its last great masterpiece, Herbert Ross’s 1981 “Pennies From Heaven,” which didn’t attract the audience it should have.
I’m still not entirely sure, after two viewings, why “Babylon” — far more than “Pennies from Heaven” — feels like the one doing the lip-syncing.
That was equally true of Dennis Potter, the creator of “Pennies from Heaven” and “The Singing Detective,” who I suspect would have warmed to this movie, and especially to the sight of Eliza, suddenly spirited from her kitchen table onto a monochrome dance floor.