Pennies From Heaven (1981)

IMDb plot summary: 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.

Directed by Herbert Ross. Stars Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, and Jessica Harper.

Pennies From Heaven stars Steve Martin as a mostly unsuccessful sheet music salesman in the early 1900s, Jessica Harper as his frigid wife, and Bernadette Peters as the naive school teacher he takes up an affair with. The film is also a musical, with characters doing lip synced song and dance numbers to recordings of classic songs from the era. I went through the whole gamut of emotions watching this movie. In the first third or so I loved it and thought it was one of the best movies I'd seen in awhile. I loved the creativity of the musical numbers and how it fit into the world. But as the story went on, I became less and less invested in the narrative, even though many of the musical numbers were still entertaining. This film definitely feels like it's trying to say something, but the tone is so muddled it's hard to take much out of it. The darkness of the story takes you by surprise in a way that I wonder if it would sit differently on a rewatch, knowing where the story is headed. I still say it's worth a watch because it is a creative way of making a musical and the musical numbers themselves are often really enjoyable, but it doesn't come together the way that I hoped it would when I first started watching it.

🎥 Pennies from Heaven (1981)

📊 Ranked #2168/4247 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 51

beat Corpse Bride (#2163 → #2307)

lost to Oliver Twist (held at #1116)

beat Ghostbusters (#1635 → #1660)

lost to Shadow of the Vampire (#1385 → #1386)

lost to The Sound of Music (held at #1510)

lost to The Ref (#1572 → #1573)

lost to Mrs Brown (#1603 → #1604)

beat The Front (#1618 → #1625)

lost to Die Hard (#1610 → #1612)

beat mother! (#1614 → #1615)

lost to The Meg (#1612 → #1588)

lost to Interiors (#1613 → #1587)