Ha'penny

By R. C.

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN Directed by Herbert Ross Screenplay by Dennis Potter

Steve Martin has a face straight out of a 1930s B movie: smooth, smiling, with regular features and a subtly oafish flair to thejawline. Jessica Harper is frail, frazzled, wide-eyed and sad-mouthed in the '30s tradition of soiled ingenues. Bernadette Peters looks like the offspring of a Kewpie Doll and a Munchkin. Christopher Walken's face is a gigolo's death mask: the character lines have been ironed out, leaving only the dry-ice eyes and the knowing pout. As icons, these four performers would seem perfect for the bittersweet revisionism of this musical drama about a sheet-music salesman (Martin), his frigid wife (Harper), his nice-turned-naughty mistress (Peters) and his slick rival (Walken).But icons do not always make for compelling screen personalities--especially when, as here, more is demanded than just another appropriate face.

As a six-part BBC series, Pennies was a beguilingly schizophrenic project. It mixed the rigorous naturalism of poverty and mean spirits in the Depression with opulently choreographed dream sequences that stopped just this side of camp. The characters, however rueful or ruthless, were also insatiably idealistic. They actually believed the words of the period's popular songs--so much so that they lip-synced the lyrics to the recordings, and their sad, drab lives dissolved into the art deco optimism of Hollywood musicals.

All that is retained here; what is missing is an animating cohesion that would keep the actors from looking stranded in two different movies. In his singing and dancing debut, Martin goes through paces with the game energy of Dr. Johnson's dog, and the other stars seem weighed down by the movie's megabudget. Only Vernel Bagneris--with his dusky sensitivity and a body that moves through his soft-shoe number like a Slinky on an escalator--develops a strong personality. Visually too Pennies is of two minds: Ken Adam's precisely gaudy sets need megawatt illumination, but Cinematographer Gordon Willis keeps most of the lighting as morose as a coal miner's funeral. Perhaps this was not the project on which to lavish so many MGM millions. The BBC show was an enchanted cottage; this is the Las Vegas Grand Hotel. --R.C.

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