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True Brit
The original Pennies from Heaven
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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First telecast in 1978, Pennies from Heaven is the six-part BBC mini-series that pioneered writer Dennis Potter’s trademark combination of Brechtian technique and Freudian subtext. Potter’s Depression-era characters are men and women in woeful extremis whose ability to voice their perennially dashed dreams and desperate feelings is severely limited. But he permits them lyrical epiphanies: they lip-synch popular songs and perform elaborate numbers that offer ironic counterpoints to their actual situations. In the magnificent 1981 American movie version directed by Herbert Ross, the numbers were lush and evoked the styles of Hollywood musicals of the ’30s; in the most astonishing one, Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters silhouetted and then replaced Astaire and Rogers on Follow the Fleet’s "Let’s Face the Music and Dance." The BBC original — now available on DVD from Warner — is (deliberately) shabbier and less familiar; it is, after all, a Brit’s musical-comedy vision. If you love the movie, you’ll probably miss the spectacle, and the rhythms may feel a little weird. Although the director, Piers Haggard, has a freakish talent for pop-painterly images, he lacks the facility at staging that Jon Amiel brought to Potter’s later masterpiece, The Singing Detective. And our hindsight view of Pennies from Heaven in its longhand form tells us why Potter cut some of the material for the movie (especially the subplot in Part 5 involving a failed attempt at blackmailing a politician). Still, it’s amazing. Bob Hoskins’s Arthur is a hapless sheet-music salesman who dreams of opening his own music store and enjoying a more sexually satisfying relationship than the one he has with his repressed, miserable wife, Joan (Gemma Craven). The woman he finds, Eileen (Cheryl Campbell), is a Nottingham schoolteacher from a family of bellicose miners. (The Nottingham setting, like the flashback sequences in The Singing Detective, bring Potter back to the scene of his own fraught childhood.) Arthur gets Eileen pregnant and, true to form, deserts her; by the time their paths cross again, she’s whoring herself to pay back the pimp (Hywel Bennett) who bankrolled her abortion. The other major character is the Accordion Man (Kenneth Colley), a starving street musician whom Arthur treats at a pub one night. A truly frightening emanation of the Depression nightmare, the Accordion Man is also a kind of alter ego for Arthur, and their fates are finally twisted up together. The mini-series goes much farther in linking the two men than Potter was able to show in the movie, where the Accordion Man (the gifted African-American dancer Vernel Bagneris) is a haunting suggestion of an idea that feels — without the TV version to explain it — like an idea that hasn’t been worked through fully. Craven, a West End musical-comedy star, does wonders with her songs, though her straight scenes sometimes feel strained. (I love the trio she executes with two housewife pals, to "I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You" — a fantasy of marital revenge.) The other principal actors are pretty well beyond criticism. In the Christopher Walken part, baby-faced Hywel Bennett is very creepy, and his line readings are hard-edged and curdled. Even more unsettling is Kenneth Colley, with his drawn, anemic face, his aggressive stutter, and the look of a man who’s been wounded beyond repair and is capable of anything. At the end of the "Pennies from Heaven" number in the pub scene — the mini-series, like the film, uses the plaintive Arthur Tracy version of the famous song — he licks his plate sadly; it’s a strangely affecting moment. Campbell, who hasn’t received much notice in this country (she was the passionate aristocrat who takes down her hair in The Shooting Party), isn’t a song-and-dance woman, like Bernadette Peters, but her balance of Eileen’s fervent credulousness and surprising toughness and resourcefulness, her delicacy and sensuousness, is as staggering as Peters’s. Guided by Potter’s nerve and imagination, she takes the character as far as it will go — to grotesque extremes, in fact, in a startling episode in Part 6 where a loony farmer with a shotgun (Philip Locke) catches her and Arthur making love in his barn. And I’d be tempted to say this is the finest work Bob Hoskins has done. Arthur is cursed with a sputtering inexpressiveness, but Hoskins articulates the intense, fragmented emotion behind it. Even if there were no other reason to preserve the series on DVD, Hoskins alone would make Pennies from Heaven a precious commodity.
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