Pennies from Heaven

Christian Century, Dec 14, 2004

Pennies from Heaven

This 1981 MGM release should have brought musicals back, but it bombed at the box office and wound up being the last great musical for two decades (until Chicago). Steve Martin plays a down-on-his-luck song plugger who dreams of opening his own music store; Jessica Harper is his dour, longsuffering wife and Bernadette Peters is the schoolteacher he tumbles for. The period is the Depression, which is also a symbol for the unhappy lives in which this trio--as well as some vivid supporting characters--is bogged. In the amazing musical numbers, the actors open their mouths and the voices of popular singers of the 1930s waft out of them, giving expression to emotions the characters are too blocked up to release on their own.