Pennies From Heaven (1981, Herbert Ross) (Patreon)

62/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. This time I (finally!) watched the BBC miniseries beforehand, and spent much of those eight hours thinking that no conventional-length film could possibly do it justice. (My memory of this version, over 25 years later, was quite hazy.) The fourth episode, in particular, depicts Eileen's "recruitment" by a pimp in methodical, painstaking detail, allowing a steady torrent of sleazy patter to wear down her resistance bit by bit. I knew that must still happen in the movie, as Christopher Walken memorably plays the pimp, but couldn't imagine it being remotely as powerful condensed to five or even ten minutes. (Turns out to be roughly nine.) "This must have been cut, more's the pity" was a constant refrain in my head. 

I was mistaken. Not about all the cuts—no avoiding that—but in my conviction that a streamlined Pennies From Heaven wouldn't work. Potter retains everything truly crucial, including elements that I was sure wouldn't survive (and had forgotten that I'd already seen). Because Steve Martin was still at or very near the height of his popularity, coming off The Jerk, I assumed that he and/or MGM would insist on toning down Arthur's despicable qualities, making him more sympathetic; to my astonishment, his performance is uglier than Hoskins', turning our "hero" into even more of a...well, a jerk. Asshole, really. His stand-up persona devoid of quotation marks and winking irony. Arthur's relentless horniness remains intact, right down to Joan getting browbeaten into putting lipstick on her nipples (and then showing him in tears). But Martin also generally makes him more smug, less desperate. To use the parlance of our time, he comes across as grotesquely privileged, despite clearly being lower-middle-class at best. That's partly because there's no time for all the TV scenes chronicling Arthur's failures as a salesman, but it's equally a function of Martin (and Potter, who rewrites a lot of the early dialogue) making radically different choices. Hoskins' performance is richer by far, but Martin's better suits this shorter, brusquer (I say it's a word) version. Same goes for Bernadette Peters, who can't recreate Cheryl Campbell's fearsomely complex interpretation of Eileen (I do miss the very disturbing farmhouse sequence) but succeeds in creating a simpler and eminently effective analogue. Strictly as melodrama, this Pennies comes remarkably close to the original's greatness.

Where it comparatively stumbles is in its re-conceived deployment of Potter's signature lip-synced musical numbers. I knew the movie was in trouble on that (heh) score immediately, when Ross cuts, during the very first song, from a shot of Arthur mouthing its lyrics to an objective shot of the "real" Arthur, as he was before the music started (though it continues). That's an utter betrayal of Potter's approach, which makes a point of not explicitly positioning the musical numbers as fantasies, even though we understand that they are. Transitions are made entirely via shifts in lighting, and usually occur continuously (both before and after) with naturalistic dialogue; while the actors may dance and mug to the camera, they always remain in the same dingy location. Why is that important? Couldn't have articulated the reason prior to rewatching the film, but now I know: Because treating these interludes as conventional musical numbers—as showcases to be evaluated based on their flash, verve, imagination and technical skill—robs them of their poignance. To some extent, Ross' Hollywood treatment still kinda plays; I quite liked the staging of Arthur and Eileen mirroring Fred and Ginger in Follow the Fleet, for example, and of course Walken tears the roof off the joint. But the glossiness—lavish sets! a professional chorus!—paradoxically makes these flights of fancy feel much more ordinary. I was also quite surprised to find that Potter used entirely different songs for the film (with a couple of exceptions). Maybe the studio demanded standards more familiar to an American audience than "Radio Times" would likely have been, even back then.  

Bottom line: Decidedly inferior to the miniseries, but significantly better than anyone could realistically have expected. I might even have bumped the rating into my 'B' range (which starts at 64) had it not chickened out at the very end by keeping the explicitly manufactured happy ending without first showing (as opposed to suggesting) what actually happens. You need that bluntness first; giving him a song on the scaffold, without at least Von Trier-ing it up, is just cowardly