5th
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Pennies from Heaven: Steve Martin (1981)
A few weeks ago I posted Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters singing “You Belong to Me” from the 1976 movie The Jerk. It was a popular post, as I imagined it would be; it’s a fantastic tune and Martin and Peters are, simply put, adorable.
Here then, with all that it implies, is the theoretical B-side.
Pennies from Heaven, starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters, is a largely forgotten film, but how, I am not sure. It’s a rather dark and depressing musical wherein all the songs are lip-synced to the original Hollywood performances (coming largely from the 1930s Busby Berkeley era). In other words, it seems (to me) too strange to be forgotten. If audiences were surprised to find a decidedly serious Steve Martin tap dancing up a storm, then nothing could have prepared them for Christopher Walken’s tap dancing strip tease scene. (Yes!) The film lost about $13 million.
A few years ago I found the soundtrack on vinyl and was excited to find that this song – the only song newly recorded for the film – was on it. The song appears at the end of the film (spoiler alert) just before Martin’s character, Arthur Parker, is sentenced to death. Martin’s spoken delivery, perhaps more so than Bing Crosby’s consummately sung original, painfully reminds us just how bittersweet this oft-sung jazz standard truly is.
But then no wonder the film bombed. Who wants to be reminded that life’s finer moments can only be appreciated in the shadow of tragedy, misfortune, and misery? That is, besides a poignantly romantic and unequivocally secular realist like myself.
