Pennies From Heaven (1981)

Plot: A Depression-era sheet-music salesman and his innocent schoolteacher mistress try to escape their dreary lives through popular music .
Stars: Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken, Steve Martin.

What did Pauline Kael Think?   She wrote one of her border-line hysterical "this is so great" reviews. Sample?  “ Pennies from Heaven is the most emotional movie musical I’ve ever seen. It’s a stylized mythology of the Depression which uses the popular songs of the period as expressions of people’s deepest longings—for sex, for romance, for money, for a high good time. There’s something new going on—something thrilling—when the characters in a musical are archetypes yet are intensely alive…. Steve Martin … gives an almost incredibly controlled performance, and Bernadette Peters is mysteriously right in every nuance. 

What Did I think? This movie should be shelved under "What were they thinking?". It was madness  to take a dark 7.5 hour  BBC TV series and then:

• transfer it to an American setting
• compress it down to 98 minutes. and 
• replace Hoskins and Campbell with steve Martin and Bernadette Peters

1) In the series, each 72  minute episode had perhaps 12 minutes of lip-synched music.  The other 60 minutes were dramatic. As a result the device (or gimmick) added to drama, it didn't dominate it. But by using 20 minutes of lip-synching in a 98 minute movie, the gimmick becomes overbearing.  Before too long, I stopped being amused and become annoyed and bored.  And why lip-synch Peters and Martin?  They can sing.

2) By compressing the "Book" from 6 hours to 75 minutes, you lose the characters and turn the story from "dark" to miserable and sleezy.  And by transfereing it to the USA you lose all the context that made the story bearable.

3) And Steve Martin is not a great actor - he's a comedian.  For some reason, he often looks unattracive in the movie.  And, you cant take him seriously.  You watch him and Peters and think, "Why aren't they being funny?".   

In old Hollywood, they wouldn've junked the dark story and written a cheerful musical with some comedy.  But new Hollywood didn't.  And they bombed.

Summary:  There are a couple great song and dance numbers.  Watch those, skip everything else.