Pennies from Heaven

Mr. Doyle's poor review is questionable at best. This film is a delight from beginning to end. Edith Fellows does NOT play a brat, but a determined and pleasant young girl who can use a little guidance. The songs are fun and Bing and Edith make a great team! If this was a crappy movie, the DVD wouldn't cost $30!! Madge Evans is a bit of a pain, but that's the role she has to play and does it well. Donald Meek is typically good, but Edith steals the show in the first scene at the carnival. Funny when her line 'Thank you, you CROOK! appears near the film's first few minutes. I;m giving this a 9 out of 10. I don't know where some of the rural scenes were filmed, but the interiors were filmed at the old General Service Studios in Hollywood.

Pleasant if meandering Bing Crosby vehicle casts him as a man unjustly jailed who is given a note to deliver by a condemned man. Out of prison, he tracks down the Smith family in New Jersey and discovers a lonely girl (Edith Fellows) who lives with her destitute grandfather (Donald Meek). On opening the note they realize the condemned man has left them a house. Crosby ambles along with them and becomes part of the family, much to the dismay of a nosy social worker (Madge Evans). Somehow it is decided that they will open a restaurant in the house and thus provide a steady income to satisfy the social worker. No one seems unduly concerned about school or the fact that a total stranger has moved into the household.

Not a lot of logic here but Crosby and Fellows are quite good. Evans seems a little ill at ease with her character. Meek is always good. Louis Armstrong shows up as a chicken thief and bandleader/singer at the restaurant. Nana Bryant is another social worker. George Chandler is a harried waiter. Nydia Westman has a nice scene as a maid with Crosby. Harry Tyler is the cheating ring-toss man, and Tom Dugan plays daredevil manager.

Not a great film but it has a few pleasant songs, including the title number, and Crosby continues his screen persona of easy-going and decent. Fellows is quite good as the sometimes bratty girl. Evans is very pretty--too bad she did get better films and parts.

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.

Bing Crosby is one of the few performers who while he performed in over 70 films while he was alive, was so talented he has now appeared as a performer in just as many after his death in archive footage. He was a very shrewd Businessman too. This film, released by Columbia, was really made by a production company partly owned by Bing. A lot of film historians forget how Democratic the earlier years of films were where often the actors owned their own productions before the studio system really took over in the late 1930's. The big stars like Crosby even later than this had the power to own their own films and get a piece of the box office.

This film has the major attraction of Crosby in his prime with plenty of support and a fine performance by Louis Armstrong who is one of the great musical performers of the era too. Directed by Norman Z McCleoud who is a comedy director with Monkey Business & Horsefeathers, 2 of the great Marx Brothers films already on his resume, this film flows along quite nicely. The script is light hearted and puts together just enough plot to get through all the great musical numbers.

This is the type of film that isn't made anymore but is great to see, especially since a lot of Crosbys work is very entertaining. This one holds up well even today after all these years.

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.