"I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They didn't realize that the '30s were a very innocent age, and that it should have been set in the eighties – it was just froth; it makes you cry it's so distasteful." That was Fred Astaire's take on 1981's Pennies From Heaven.
shareFred lived high on the hog, a rich and famous celebrity, richly richly rewarded for his huge talent.
In the 30's, it may very well have been a more 'innocent' time. There was no internet. People weren't as well educated. They were expected to suffer, suck it up, hope for the clouds to roll by, and they all swarmed to the movies to admire their betters. Including Fred. Look at his movies! It was all glamorous platinum blonde babes in satin halter gowns. All sitting at little tables in nightclubs watching Busby Berkely extravaganzas before getting into their glamorous 1930's cars and going back to their art deco mansions. Well, thanks, Fred. I'm sure all the starving folk of the Depression were so unlifted by your movies, but that doesn't mean there WAS no 'cheap and vulgar'. There has been 'cheap and vulgar' and distasteful things since prehistoric times.
My thoughts, exactly.
Enjoy some holiday music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuTWA6SBupY
"People weren't as well educated"? Absolute bull****!
IMHO, what was innocent in the 1930s was the movies, not the times and certainly not the people. Fred was probably expecting to see a 1930s-style movie with a 1930s script, which would explain his disappointment. But PFH was made in 1981 for a 1981 audience. (Although for some reason its intended audience didn't watch it in the theaters: when they saw the Steve Martin name, of "The Jerk" fame, moviegoers probably assumed it was going to be another silly comedy.)
He must have confused it with the X-rated version that Ron Jeremy and John Holmes put together: "Penis from Heaven."
shareIMHO, what was innocent in the 1930s was the movies, not the times and certainly not the people.
Everybody's wrong once in a while.
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"It's better not to know so much about what things mean." David Lynch
He had his chance to do musicals. Why should he have been critical of others doing such films?
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JimHutton (1934-79) & ElleryQueen
Well, because, by including the footage from one of Fred Astaire's movies, Herbert Ross was trading on Fred's image/brand (without his consent or any remuneration). I'm sure MGM was within their legal rights to do so, but nobody should be shocked that an old star would be miffed by this.
As to Fred's overall dislike of PFH's "vulgarity", I'd say that he, too, had been brainwashed into drinking the Life-is-a-Bowl-of-Cherries Kool-Aid that the movies were selling in the 1930's.
BTW, other golden-age stars took umbrage with 1970's Myra Breckinridge doing the same inserting-clips-from-old-movies gimmick . . . although even the worst critic of PFH would agree that it's 10,000 times better than Myra Breckinridge.
Oh there was a large amount of "vulgarity" in this movie. Please don't disrespect Fred Astaire for his opinion, he must have been furious.
Astaire's films were pure escapist entertainment, made to give the people a bit of joy in those awful times. I'd rather watch any Rogers/Astaire film than this grim stuff. (Even though the dance numbers were terrific.)
This film was based on a British tv production that I would really like to see. Martin's version was a failure not because people didn't "get" it, but because it was a mess.
Roscoe "Fattie" Arbuckle, Al Capone and many others of the time would disagree about the characterisation of the time as an innocent age.