Pennies from Heaven (1936)

"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!

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN has an improbable story about a drifter (BING CROSBY) who plays the lute and sings for his supper at a nightclub he opens at The Haunted House Cafe. The house has been inherited by DONALD COOK and EDITH FELLOWS from a prisoner on death row who wills the house to them as atonement for having killed the girl's father and is turned into a café by Bing and his friends, including LOUIS ARMSTRONG who is the vocalist and trumpet player.The main focal of the plot is Bing's relationship with bratty little Edith Fellows, who causes no end of trouble throughout and is the most irritating factor about the whole thing although she's meant to be amusing and cute. MADGE EVANS as a social worker brings some sense of practicality to the whole affair and DONALD COOK provides some good humor, but the script meanders all over the place.Crosby makes the role of the drifter pleasant enough but his character is never quite believable. Only when the musical numbers are played does the film reach any real level of entertainment, particularly during the "haunted" number at the café featuring a skeleton dance while Louis Armstrong belts out the song.This is a harmless trifle in Bing's career, on loan to Columbia before his big successes at Paramount, and mostly because he delivers a few songs in his unmistakable crooning style, particularly the title tune.Bing is his usual amiable self, but the script is miserable. He is credited with giving Armstrong a break by insisting that he be given prominent billing, a breakthrough for Louis. They would appear in four films together throughout Crosby's career.

In one film of the period, made away from Paramount at Columbia, Crosby changed for the better his devil-may-care attitude long enough to help a down-and-out family… "Pennies from Heaven" cast him as a friendly vagabond, released from prison after being convicted on a false charge…He befriends the daughter (Edith Fellows) and father (Donald Meek) of an executed murderer, setting them up in a ramshackle mansion that he turns into a profitable café… Sentimental and curiously melancholic, the film was one of the very few Crosby movies to acknowledge the Depression

Bing Crosby was loaned out from Paramount to Columbia for this film and Columbia did no better for him in the way of budget than Paramount. Again relying on Crosby's personality to bring in the box office, if anything Columbia probably spent less money than Paramount on his films.What they did do was give Crosby a good supporting cast, a role tailor- made for him and a good score of tunes to sing, topped by one of his immortal hits, the title tune Pennies from Heaven. This was the second of 15 movie songs introduced by Bing that were nominated for the Academy Award as best song when that award actually meant something.Crosby's Larry Poole is a more delineated character than most of the ones he did in the 1930s. He's asked by a prisoner who's on death row to look up the family of a man he murdered and give them the key to an old house that the prisoner owned. He meets up with the family which consists of juvenile Edith Fellows and grandfather Donald Meek. He also tangles with social worker Madge Evans, but in the end all his righted.In the real world I can't believe that civil servant Evans would ever take up with a vagabond character like Larry Poole, definitely not in this day and age. But if he's played by Bing Crosby, well.........The film has one other interesting feature. Donald Meek mentions to Crosby a few times that while he's down on his luck now, he expects to come into a regular source of income soon. Finally Bing asks just what is this expected windfall and Meek replies, "The Townsend Plan."Today's audience would not get that dated bit of humor, but the Townsend Plan was the brainstorm of a Doctor Francis Townsend who was a retired physician who came up with a scheme in which the elderly were to be paid in scrip (in other words money that had to be spent) and then that money would be taxed through the sales which would in turn pay for another month's scrip and so on and so on. At the time of the filming of Pennies from Heaven this plan had a lot of followers in the country which was in a depression. Of course Townsend never got his plan passed, but a lot of historians credit him with raising such a fuss over what we did with our elderly that the result was Social Security.One of Bing's best.