The Roaring Thirties

MEET ARTHUR PARKER. He's a traveling sheet-music salesman with a lot of dreams. He dreams of his own music store and an escape from the drudgery of everyday life. He dreams of a beautiful woman who will revel with him in the pleasures of the flesh. Sometimes he says things like, "Listen, there's got to be something on the other side of the rainbow." At other times, he wails, "There must be a place somewhere in the world where the songs are real." But it's 1934, and only stars like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers have anything to sing about. Times are hard. No one wants to buy Arthur's music. An evil bank manager refuses to lend him the money to start up a store. Worst of all, his frigid wife Joan just doesn't like sex. "I want you to cut his thing off," she cries to a detective toward the end of this strange, sordid movie. By this time, not a few members of the audience may be thinking the same.

For begging his wife to paint her nipples with lipstick, Arthur (Steve Martin) comes off not playful, but pathetic. When he tries to excite her with a story of a couple making love in an elevator, he arouses only disgust. And when, unshaven and crude, he whines, "Joanie, I need you," it becomes clear that sexuality, instead of carrying him out of his squalid little world, only marks him more clearly as part of it. Arthur's insatiable libido--around which the movie revolves--may or may not represent the collective frustrations of the age but it sure doesn't make for an appealing 2 1/4 hours.

MODELED CLOSELY on an English mini-series of the same title, Pennies from Heaven traces Arthur's adulterous romance with a baby-faced kindergarten teacher named Eileen Everson (Bernadette Peters), and follows the pair to their eventual downfall when Arthur becomes suspect in a murder. If it weren't for a surprisingly original gimmick, the movie might have just been another lowlife melodrama in the style of The Postman Always Rings Twice. But as the two lovers travel through the bleak Chicago landscape, they occasionally burst into mimicries of the kind of elaborate Busby Berkeley song-and-dance numbers Hollywood so admired during the depression. When Arthur fails to get a loan at the bank, for instance, hundreds of smiling girls in black-and-white fur bunnysuits suddenly appear, highstepping wildly to the strains of Yes, Yes, My Baby Said Yes, Yes. And when a sweetly-lisping Eileen loses control of her rowdy charges, she miraculously dons a long silver-lame dress and launches into Love is Good for Anything that Ails You, as her squadron of toddlers tapdances behind her on rows of white pianos. Instead of actually singing, though, Eileen and her chorus mouth the words to an original version of the 30's hit. All the songs in the film are done this way, and it adds a bizarre twist to Arthur's wish for a place "where the songs are real."

Lavishly choreographed by Danny Daniels, and at times hilarious, these forays into the protagonists' fantasy lives provide a welcome respite from the general gloom. As director Herbert Ross leads us relentlessly from one depression cliche to another--the deserted prairie highway, the Edward Hopper diner, the seedy hotel room complete with flashing neon sign outside the window and the El rumbling past--the song and dance numbers become an escape, not only for Arthur and Eileen, but for the audience as well. And there's a lot to escape in Pennies from Heaven. For Arthur and Eileen, sexual exploitation, grim poverty, murder and rape are only a few things to run away from. For the audience, there's always the unappetizing screenplay and Ross's self-conscious and sometimes misguided direction.

When the homeless Black accordion player whom Arthur briefly befriends sings "Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven" while dancing sopping wet outside a sleazy restaurant we get the message. The camera pans over the depressed faces of dining customers--and the lush orchestration conjures up images of black-tie dinner dances--and we get it again. By the time the set rolls back to reveal a giant montage of famous depression photos, Ross might as well have splashed a garish "ironic, get it?" across the screen.

THE MOST EXPERIENCED Broadway hoofers might think twice before dancing alongside the larger-than-life screen images of Fred and Ginger in the lovely final dance sequence of Follow the Fleet. For the competent but mediocre Steve Martin and the Less-than-competent Bernadette Peters (also mediocre) to try it is simply ridiculous. (The dance pyrotechnics are best left to Christopher Walken, who steals the film's best scene--and unfortunately his only one--while executing an elegant strip tease on top of a barroom pool table.)

But Martin is a lot more bearable hamming around a burlesque stage (as he does in one fantasy sequence) than he is playing the down-and-out loser spewing inarticulate cliches about the American dream. Likewise for Peters, who seems to feel obliged to say most of her lines (and especially winners like, "I am not very at ease with people...[long pause]...Men I mean") in a monotonous baby-doll voice uncannily reminscent of a T.V. commercial for an underarm deodorant called "Tickle." Both Martin and Peters approach their roles in a curiously stylized way, staring out of glazed eyes either vapidly (Peters) or with an intense manic glow (Martin). Only Jessica Harper, who plays the dull, frowsy Joan, seems to be able to travel comfortably between the make-believe world of the songs and her unhappy "real life" as Arthur's cuckolded wife. Perhaps if she had been in charge here, the movie--and even Arthur's thing--would have gotten the cutting it needed.