Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

lasttimeisaw A critical box-office fiasco directed by Herbert Ross (THE GOODBYE GIRL 1977, California SUITE 1978), PENNIES FROM HEAVEN is a Depression-era musical, alternates between a harsh reality and the dreamlike musical numbers of fantasy, it stars Steve Martin as a Chicago sheet- music salesman Arthur Parker, who is frustrated with his frigid wife Joan (Harper) and the failing business and gets smitten with a young school teacher Eileen (Peters) at his first glance. The affair costs Eileen her job and she deign to become a street hustler while Arthur returns to Joan, but eventually the two reunite and decide to start a new life together, but who will expect, Arthur's one-time Good Samaritan deed to a homeless man who plays an accordion (Bagneris), will lead him to his doom as a scapegoat of a murder in this unjust, bleak world.The plot is a continuum of despondency and dissatisfaction, and overtly sexually aggressive, devoid of any limerent whitewashing to appease its viewers, Arthur, is a undisguised lustful husband from the very beginning and Eileen is not a shrinking violet either in that aspect (nudge nudge), in a frank manner, she confesses that she is grateful to Arthur that she is able to be liberated from her prudish facade.By sheer contrast, the imaginary sequences of dancing and lip-syncing with oldie tunes are glamorous to the hilt. The titular song is firstly mimed and danced by Bagneris in a showering of golden coins, and later poignantly used as an epilogue sung by Arthur with a noose nearby. A show-stopping Christopher Walken tap-dances in Cole Porter's LET'S MISBEHAVE is an incredible boon to remind us that he can be deadly charming and dangerous within the same take. Martin, in his second leading film role and long before his trademark white hair begin to sprout, excels in his burlesque deftness and dramatic expertise. The Broadway diva Bernadette Peters, extracts a profound ambivalence of good-girl-gone-bad transmogrification with her sultry body language and a baby-like poker face and last but not the least, Jessica Harper will be forever remembered for the lipsticks on her nipples.PENNIES FROM HEAVEN is the last hurrah of the musical genre which had reigned Hollywood over 60 years, its unconventional tact of juggling with reality and escapism is ahead of its time and Dennis Potter's pedestrian script cannot help it either, but in retrospect, it deserves a revitalisation of BluRay treatment, even just for the sake of those sumptuous and consummate dancing-and- singing parodies.

Steven Torrey It's not surprising that Fred Astaire disliked this movie. One of the very few Hollywood characters not to be tarnished by sex scandals. One can only imagine a wounded Judy Garland actually enjoying working with someone of his character and caliber in "Easter Parade." Fred Astaire, despite the sexual innuendos inherent to his plot lines, didn't seem to want to realize his movies were ultimately about sex. Boy gets girl for what purpose? A question Fred Astaire didn't ask or didn't want an answer to.But we know lots of people do sex while listening to Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Nat 'King' Cole, Johhny Mathis, Luther Vandross and so on. Often times doing sex with people they shouldn't be doing sex with and thus Astaire, et.al. become unwitting participants / insturments of evil intention. (While candy is dandy, and liquor is quicker: music is slicker.) Innocence--lost--is core to the movie. Innocence occurs when the elderly principal of the school walks in and asserts he can still remember that grammar school ditty about the calendar. "In January..." Eileen, the teacher who had become Arthur's paramour has told the principal that she is now pregnant with Arthur's child; he gives her a few dollars to help her through but must dimiss her nonetheless. (She has a subsequent abortion--another level of innocence lost.) A following scene is with Christopher Walken in the bar, where he will transform her from innocent teacher to fallen prostitute-- "Let's Misbehave"--thus completing Arthur's transformation of her from innocent to fallen.Arthur, as the viewer knows, didn't murder anyone so the 'Hollywood' ending of him walking away with his now redeemed heroine is perfectly perfect in a bizarre way. The viewer is not innocent. The viewer walks into the theater knowing that the world is not nice, people are not nice, people are downright evil. All of this thanks to the evening news. But even in 1936--the Tiger Woods debacle hearkens to an even earlier Fatty Arbuckle disaster--1921, a disaster played out in newspapers of the day. (Arbuckle was found innocent of murder after three trials but his career was effectively ended.)So Arthur's sordid world matches the real sordid world forcing loss of innocence; but this being Hollywood--the whole point of Hollywood--none of it is real in the way the evening news is real. (And of course, not real to the TV viewer in the way that, say, famine is real in Biafra. That's why we use words like 'sympathy' / 'empathy' and 'pathos' / 'bathos'.) The film is masterful, as always, in spite of the principals, who in this case were without exception excellent and the viewer cannot imagine anyone else playing those roles.

GrigoryGirl This is a really ambitious film, but it's a failure. As many here have noted, it's a feature length film of a 7 hour British miniseries. Despite both being written (at least officially) by Dennis Potter, the brilliant TV writer, the movie feels essentially like a greatest hits package, taking the highlights of the miniseries, and making a film out of it. It plays almost like a 108 minute trailer. American moviegoers were majorly confused about it when it came out (it was a notorious bomb in its day), probably due to the use of pre-existing recordings mixed in with a dark, depressing story.There are some excellent things about it. It has great cinematography in it, the production design is eye boggling, and the film, despite the rushed atmosphere, manages to capture the mood and tone of the miniseries quite well. Martin, Peters, and Walken are good in their roles, but their British counterparts are better. Herbert Ross does the best he can here, and while the film is very ambitious and isn't a complete disaster, it's still not as good as the miniseries. Condensing a 7 hour TV film into a 2 hour one is never a good thing.

moonspinner55 Heavy-going, off-putting Depression-era musical (set to old recordings of the 1930s) is quite elaborate and usually looks good, but is filled with ciphers. Steve Martin, in a fair dramatic acting turn, plays a sex-obsessed sheet-music salesman in Chicago with no conscience who cheats on his frigid wife with a schoolteacher, later becoming involved in a murder investigation. Unfortunately for Martin, this character is such a crude, lascivious lout, we don't really care about his fate or whether or not his teacher-girlfriend (now a prostitute) leaves him. Jessica Harper (as the cold-fish wife) is every married man's nightmare: the bride-turned-shrew; Bernadette Peters is somewhat more sympathetic as the lover, and gets to utilize her natural Kewpie doll-ness to fantastic effect in the musical numbers. But, for the most part, "Pennies From Heaven" is peopled with low-lifes. The extravagant showstoppers, fantasy sequences designed like mini Busby Berkeley movies, are breathlessly intricate and exciting to watch, but they provide little emotional subtext for what's happening in the real world (I don't know if original creator Dennis Potter meant it or not, but the material plays like "Up the Sandbox" with music). Herbert Ross directed with a heavy hand, though he does get some fine moments from his cast, especially Christopher Walken as a hoofing pimp. An expensive remake of a British mini-series starring Bob Hoskins, the movie ultimately feels a bit claustrophobic and sluggish, and has an unsatisfying wrap-up to its reedy-thin plot. **1/2 from ****