Pennies from Heaven (1936)
Larry Poole, in prison on a false charge, promises an inmate that when he gets out he will look up and help out a family. The family turns out to be a young girl, Patsy Smith, and her elderly grandfather who need lots of help. This delays Larry from following his dream and going to Venice and becoming a gondolier. Instead, he becomes a street singer and, while singing in the street, meets a pretty welfare worker, Susan Sprague. She takes a dim view of Patsy's welfare under the guardianship of Larry and her grandfather and starts proceedings to have Patsy placed in an orphanage.
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Waste of time
Very disappointing...
Good movie but grossly overrated
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
this movie is boring beyond belief. i think the worse part was Edith Fellows...i would have left her in the orphanage. bratty not very cute and over acting she just made me cringe. Bing Crosby is alright but the songs he sings are forgettable and too bland. what was Donald Meek doing there.....they could have invented a non existing grandpa and would have saved on pay roll. the lead actress Madge Evans very ordinary. the story line is predictable and you just cant wait till the darn film to end. I am a BING fan but he should have dropped this dud. as for Edith fellows for sure her role called for her to be on the bratty side but she wasn't lovable in any ways and i felt no sadness when she was crying in the orphanage. miscast all the way.
"Pennies from Heaven" is thematically so similar to "Penny Serenade" (a classic tear-jerker) that one might think was Columbia's attempt to (forgive me) cash in on the success of "Penny Serenade" (another Columbia film). But the latter came five years later. "Pennies from Heaven" is little more than a Bing Crosby vehicle -- one badly in need of a tune-up.It starts off well enough, with a man about to be executed for murder handing a letter to a self-styled "troubadour" (Bing Crosby) to be delivered to the family of the man he killed. Once Crosby finds them, he makes a half-hearted effort to help (he's on his way to Venice), but his affection for the man's daughter (Edith Fellows) encourages him to stay. When a social worker (Madge Evens) comes after the girl to put her in an orphanage, Crosby announces a plan to open a restaurant.It is at this point that the story runs off the rails of plausibility, crashing into a chasm deeper than any Wile E Coyote ever fell into. I need not describe the fore-ordained and saccharine ending, made possible by the miracle of Arbitrary Plotting.There are good things. If you like Der Bingle, you get to hear him introduce the classic title song. Louis Armstrong (whom Crosby insisted be hired) is a treat, Edith Fellows is an agreeably anarchic child, and Stanley Andrews (the host of "Death Valley Days") has an unbilled role as a plainclothes officer. Evans, though, is sufficiently blah one wonders how a woman-hater like Crosby's character would ever find her attractive.Jo Swerling wrote better scripts than this one, but Norman McLeod's direction is tight and brisk. Note his unusual camera angles, as when Fellows looks through her opera glasses at Crosby.Nevertheless, "Pennies from Heaven" is one of those "less than the sum of its parts" films in which everyone's contribution is wasted on a poor story. You may safely skip it.PS: Crosby's character says at one point that he was born in Washington state -- which the real Crosby was. (Different city, though.)
"Pennies From Heaven" is not a particularly deep film and the film is filled with lots of music. Because of this, I might easily have predicted I wouldn't like it--as these are the sort of things I usually don't enjoy. However, I can happily say that because the film turned out to be a lot of fun AND the music was light and enjoyable.The film, oddly, starts on death row! An inmate about to be executed asks to see another prisoner and this request is granted. He wants to see Bing Crosby--a man you just can't imagine being in prison! And, it turns out they don't even know each other. Because of this, the condemned man asking Crosby to do him a favor seems pretty odd, but he agrees. He is to locate the family of the murdered man and give them a deed for a home--a small way the condemned man can try to make amends.Eventually, Bing does find the family--which turns out to be a child and her grandfather (Donald Meek). They are is trouble--without money AND a social worker (Madge Evans) breathing down their necks--they want to put the child in an orphanage! Well, Bing takes to the kid and makes it his job to keep this from happening. Because of this, there is a lot of friction between him and Evans--though you know that the cliché is that they'll eventually fall in love.There's a lot more to the story than this. It's all quite predictable but also pretty nice family viewing. Some might balk at it and think it's a bit sappy. I can understand this, but also occasionally like this sort of thing. Well-acted, nice music and a nice directorial touch--it's one musical I actually liked!
How innocent the movies were 70 years ago! But innocent doesn't mean without cool: Bing is the paragon of smooth, then or today. And what a vehicle for several excellent pop songs: "Pennies From Heaven", of course, but also "So Do I", "Let's Call A Heart A Heart" and even "One, Two, Button My Shoe". Of course the plot is no more sophisticated than Bellini's operas, but who's really watching it for the plot when it's bel canto?! And you have to love the interplay between Bing and Louis Armstrong - and while you're watching Louis, that's Lionel Hampton playing the drums rather than vibes tonight - not many remember that he first started on the drums before moving to the vibes. I mean, what's not to like here? Check this thing out, you'll love it. Even the graphics on the hand-painted "The Haunted House Cafe" sign are fun!