Pennies from Heaven (1978, UK/1981, USA)

Wow. Where to start?

I’ve been reading Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops blog (and if you love bad movies, you should be, too), and it’s brought a number of things to my attention, among them the cinematic masterpieces Alone in the Dark and Mindhunters, which I rented for, uh . . . research purposes. Uh-huh. Research.

A little while back, Rabin’s blog reminded me of a movie I saw once when I was in high school, or perhaps even junior high - Pennies from Heaven. Pennies made quite an impact on me back then - despite my realization that the whole thing was kind of a mess, I found it utterly gorgeous. Several of the production numbers were burned into my brain, in particular the slinky tap dance to the titular song and Christopher Walken’s pimp striptease to “Let’s Misbehave.” Yes, you read that right. Go rent it RIGHT NOW.

What I didn’t know then was that Pennies was a remake of a 1978 BBC miniseries starring Bob Hoskins. The BBC mini is the real deal – dark, ugly, and utterly fantastic. Dennis Potter wrote the Depression-era story of a traveling sheet music salesman, Arthur Parker, who is so unsatisfied by his wife and his life that his only means of escape is his fantasy life – surreal sequences where he and other characters dance and lip-synch to jaunty songs of the 1920’s and 30’s. On one of his sales trips, Arthur comes across a young schoolteacher who he takes advantage of and subsequently abandons. I’ll keep quiet about what happens after that, but I will say that no one ends up terribly happy.

Potter’s original script is so deep and thorough that the idea of compressing 7.5+ hours of story into less than two hours must have been horrifying to him. It turned out to be pretty horrifying to everyone else, too, as no one was terribly interested to see Steve Martin as a randy, lying, cheating, no-good music man who occasionally breaks out into Busby Berkley-esque production numbers. But both versions of Pennies are very much worth the time and energy, although often for different reasons. The BBC version has a better cast overall, and Hoskins brings an animal lust to the role that Martin can’t evoke. It’s obviously deeper and slower, and has a lot more meat to it. But the American remake is tantalizingly flashy, and, as I said before, gorgeous. The cinematography and the production design push the envelope and accomplish what the lower-budget original couldn’t – its cinematic feel makes the divide between reality and fantasy at the core of the story really pop. It also circles back to how Depression-era media – particularly songs and movies – were so jarringly different from the lives of average men and women in both America and England.

That America-England thing is something that I’m still chewing over (how well does the story really translate from one national identity to the other?), as well as the dynamics of how the schoolteacher came about her radical change of character, and what exactly the itinerant accordion player has to do with the whole thing. There’s a lot going on in Pennies. The miniseries is certainly a time investment, but is generally much more successful as a whole than the film is. But the film delivers in certain areas that the original only touches on . . . let's call it a stand-alone companion piece. Watching the two back-to-back has thus far been one of the best movie experiences of my year.