My Year of Flops (17 page)

Still, there was method to Stigwood's madness. Wasn't the beloved
Yellow Submarine
a Beatles movie minus the Beatles? Sure, the Fab Four provided some songs, but their creative input was minimal, they didn't voice their animated doppelgängers, and their attitude toward the project was lukewarm at best.

Adapted loosely from the 1974 Off-Broadway musical
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band On The Road,
the film casts Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees as humble minstrels who rocket to superstardom after signing with a shady record label, only to watch their fortunes
change after their magical musical instruments are stolen by the villainous Mean Mr. Mustard (Frankie Howerd), a real-estate scoundrel who receives directives from the evil computer on his pimped-out bus.

As Billy Shears and the Henderson brothers, respectively, Frampton and the Bee Gees must then use their vacant stares, amateurish pantomime skills, nonexistent charisma, and middle-of-the-road versions of Beatles classics to retrieve the instruments and bring joy back to Heartland. In the fierce battle between Frampton and the Brothers Gibb to determine who can emit less star power, everybody loses.

Sgt. Pepper
takes a dark turn when Billy's love interest, Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina), dies in a skirmish with Aerosmith. A despondent Billy tries to kill himself by jumping out of a building, only to have Sgt. Pepper (played by Beatles session player Billy Preston) pop up as the most Magicalest Negro ever and get his deus ex machina on by hurling magical beams of light that bring Strawberry Fields back to life, keep Billy from plummeting to his death, and for some reason, transform supporting players into members of the Catholic clergy.

Just when it seems like the film cannot get worse, a random selection of guest stars re-create the cover of
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
for a final insult to everything the Beatles created. The closing number is a maraschino cherry of awfulness atop a 10-scoop sundae of bad ideas, incompetently executed. Is there any better way to end a “tribute” to the Beatles than with guest appearances from Dame Edna, Carol Channing, Keith Carradine, Sha-Na-Na, Hank Williams Jr., and Leif Garrett?

The Beatles explored a sonic and emotional template unprecedented in the history of pop music. There's infinite variety and sophistication in the band's humor alone. Paul McCartney brought cornball dance-hall baggy-pants broadness but also goofball absurdism, and John Lennon supplied vitriolic black humor and stinging social satire. Though it hit studios well before the Beatles reached their creative peak or underwent one of the most profound artistic evolutions in
history, 1964's
A Hard Day's Night
feels fresh, edgy, hilarious, and hip today.

But Stigwood's film reduces the Beatles' diverse, literate humor to history's dumbest variety-show skit.
Pepper
combines the worst of the old and new. It ransacks vaudeville and silent film for its hokey jokes, grossly exaggerated performances, and groaning stupidity, but adds cheesy disco flourishes and special effects that wouldn't look out of place in a Rudy Ray Moore movie.

Pepper
attempts to destroy everything resonant about the Beatles' music, stripping “She's Leaving Home” of its melancholy grace, “Good Morning Good Morning” of its caustic wit, and “A Day In The Life” of its epic, bipolar grandeur. At his most twee, Paul McCartney wrote cloying ditties that bordered on novelty songs.
Sgt. Pepper
takes this rare shortcoming in the Beatles' canon and runs with it. Guest stars Steve Martin and Alice Cooper respectively reduce “Maxwell's Silver Hammer” and “Because” to kitsch.

The musical performances fall into two discrete categories: bland, reverent mediocrities and creaky novelty songs. (The sole exception is Aerosmith's down-and-dirty take on “Come Together.” Aerosmith escapes the epic pointlessness of this whole endeavor by making the song its own—a nasty, warped, peyote-soaked blues howler delivered with sleazy conviction.) Just because something works in one context doesn't mean it will succeed in another. At the risk of being controversial, I found
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
inferior to the album that inspired it.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Madcap Musical Miserablism Case File #59:
Pennies From Heaven

Originally Posted August 16, 2007

The '30s were indeed an innocent, blissful era of Jim Crow, lynching, and widespread institutional racism and sexism, a bygone era where Hitler got tongues a-wagging over in Germany and, as
The Onion
's book
Our Dumb Century
reminds us, all America had to fear was fear itself, a crippling, interminable Depression, and the specter of Hitler and Stalin splitting up Europe into two kingdoms.

Of course, the '30s were a time of innocence and escapism for Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals. Astaire made a fortune selling upscale fantasies to people beaten down by the Depression. He had a vested interest in making sure the harsh light of reality didn't invade the shimmering dreamworld of '30s musicals.

Pennies From Heaven
has a better critical reputation than most of the films I've written about here, but it still found a way to make just about everyone unhappy, especially the people behind the acclaimed British miniseries that inspired it. In a strange way, the American
Pennies
both usurped and was usurped by its British counterpart. The accolades that greeted the limey
Pennies
ensured that the American version would forever be considered inferior, but the corporate muscle of MGM kept the English miniseries from being seen in the States for a full decade.

Rabid fans of cult writer Dennis Potter—who wrote both the British and American versions of
Pennies From Heaven
—were infuriated that MGM's remake took the original miniseries out of circulation until 1990 and that MGM didn't ask original stars Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell to reprise their roles. MGM was horrified that the film grossed only a fraction of its $22 million budget. The film's three Oscar nominations must have provided little comfort.
Pennies
scored the Best Screenplay nomination that generally goes to challenging, innovative, and edgy films that the sleepy old dinosaurs who make up
the Academy lack the testicular fortitude to festoon with nominations in higher-profile categories. True to form,
Pennies
lost to
On Golden Pond
.

Pennies
bravely cast Steve Martin in his first dramatic role. Even more audaciously, it cast him as a largely unsympathetic character. We Americans treasure our delusions. The notion that you can doggedly pursue your dreams, follow your heart, believe in the transformative powers of music and love, and still end up in a hangman's noose for a crime you didn't commit seems downright unpatriotic. And we like our dreamers pure hearted and true, not sleazy, sordid, and ruled by sex and greed like Martin's sad little schemer.

In a revelatory lead performance, Martin plays Arthur, a sheet-music salesman trapped in a loveless marriage with sour-faced scold Joan (Jessica Harper). To escape a barren home life and a career sputtering headlong into Nowheresville, Arthur frequently slips into fantasies where he lip-synchs to Tin Pan Alley ditties and cavorts his way through production numbers worthy of MGM's legendary Freed Unit.

The plastic smiles and speed-fueled peppiness of dancers in old musicals have always struck me as strained and unnerving: They embody a painfully forced bonhomie that's downright creepy.
Pennies
brilliantly exploits that blatantly artificial pep in disquieting ways. There's similarly a haunting quality to the pop and crackle of ancient recordings where dead voices gather to espouse long-forgotten hopes and dreams. There's a reason creepy old records playing at unexpected intervals are a horror-film staple.

While making his rounds one day, Arthur becomes fixated on sad-eyed schoolteacher Eileen, played by Bernadette Peters, whose rag-doll vulnerability has never been more poignant.

Arthur's sexual fantasies are as tawdry and sad as the rest of his existence. He pressures a mortified Joan into putting lipstick on her nipples in a subplot as uncomfortably voyeuristic as anything in Todd Solondz's oeuvre. But his most cherished sexual fantasy involves paying an elevator operator $20 to look the other way while he and a
game little minx have semi-public sex.
Pennies
has the temerity to suggest that under the coy double entendres, moony romanticism, and sly one-liners in old songs lies an animal hunger for sex. Martin plays this to the hilt.

Pennies
begins with Arthur in a state of despair that only intensifies as the movie progresses. He achieves his dream of opening a record store, then watches it die. Eileen becomes pregnant, gets an abortion, and sinks into prostitution at the behest of Christopher Walken's tap-dancing pimp.

Walken's striptease tap dance to “Let's Misbehave” is rightfully acclaimed, but my favorite production number remains Vernel Bagneris' devastating solo dance to the title song. In the “Pennies From Heaven” number, Bagneris' accordion-playing murderer moves with otherworldly grace, his impossibly long limbs moving slowly and strangely, as if underwater. He begins the song amid the grim faces and permanent frowns of the dispirited rabble at a run-down diner before launching into a fantasy world where shimmering pennies rain down like gilded manna.

Pennies
is fundamentally about the conflict between illusion and reality and the dual nature of escapism. Watching Astaire and Rogers glide around a ballroom for 90 minutes might help you forget your own troubles, but it also highlights the dispiriting chasm between the dreams Hollywood sells and the mundane lives of the moviegoers who buy them.

Arthur ends up getting framed for the accordion man's murder of a blind girl. As the noose tightens around his neck, the contrast between song-and-dance numbers and his unbearable life grows smaller and smaller until he begins talk-singing “Pennies From Heaven” through tears, accompanied by a ghostly unseen banjo as he awaits death.
Pennies
plays up the tragic divide between the fantasy worlds of Hollywood musicals and the sobering realities of life among the working poor. Late in the film, Martin blurs that line completely by first singing along with Astaire's celluloid image in a movie theater, then leaping boldly into the frame with Peters. I love musicals, but I also love
Heaven
's merciless deconstruction of the genre. It gets under my skin and haunts my psyche anew with each viewing.

Pennies
illustrates the truth of Noël Coward's famous line that it's “extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” a quip that could double as Potter's epitaph. But don't take my word for it. Here's Martin's wholly unbiased take on the film's defenders and critics: “I must say that the people who get the movie, in general, have been wise and intelligent; the people who don't get it are ignorant scum.”

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success