BING IN HOLLYWOOD: PENNIES FROM HEAVEN - PART TWO

The big draw of the film was the music. The entire score was written by the great team of Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke, who wrote many of Bing’s mid 1930s films. The title song “Pennies From Heaven” was nominated for an Oscar for best song, but it lost out to Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight” from the Fred Astaire and Ginger Roger’s film Swing Time. The July 24, 1936, recording by Bing Crosby on Decca Records topped the charts of the day for ten weeks in 1936 and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004. Bing Crosby also recorded the song in a performance with Louis Armstrong and Frances Langford with Jimmy Dorsey and his Orchestra on Decca and issued as a 12" 78rpm recording.

Crosby recorded the song again for his 1954 album Bing: A Musical Autobiography. The other songs fit well into the Bing mold of songs with the optimistic “One Two Button Your Shoe” and the romantic ballads: “So Do I” and “Let’s Call A Heart A Heart”. Next to the title song, my favorite number from the film was the Louis Armstrong solo “Skeletons In The Closet”. Do yourself a favor and listen to Armstrong’s Decca recording of the song. It is pure audio gold!

Looking back at the reviews from 1936, I am surprised they were not more positive. Variety wrote: 

"Pennies from Heaven may qualify as a fair grosser because of Crosby’s name, but basically it’s a weak picture with a story that has little movement and only a scattered few mild giggles. It’s spread pretty thin over 80 minutes, despite a good tuneful score which should be no handicap… Film won’t advance Crosby although Crosby may overcome its faults to some extent. Best individual impression is by Louis Armstrong, Negro cornetist and hi-de-ho expert. Not as an eccentric musician, but as a Negro comedian he suggests possibilities. He toots his solo horn to a nice individual score, plus his band chores. Crosby has a couple of songs that will be reprised into fair popularity..."

Despite what the critics thought of the film, the movie holds a special place in my heart. A generation divided my Grandfather and I, but when he played me Bing Crosby music, that age gap disappeared, and my Grandfather was one of the best friends I ever had. He instilled in me a love of Bing Crosby, and I can still remember where the scratches were on his Decca 78 of “Pennies From Heaven”. Sitting and watching the film with him in the early 1990s was a simple memory but one of my favorite times. Watching 1936’s Pennies From Heaven not only displays Bing Crosby rise to the top of his performing ability, but it brings back fond memories of my Grandfather. I consider a movie that does that 80 plus years after it was released to be a great movie indeed!

MY RATING: 10 OUT OF 10

BING IN HOLLYWOOD: PENNIES FROM HEAVEN - PART ONE

This past December, my Grandfather would have turned 90. As a tribute to him, I watched his favorite Bing Crosby movie 1936’s Pennies From Heaven. I remember for the longest time this film was not available on video and DVD, and my Grandfather was overjoyed when it was released. I personally think that this is the first Bing movie that showed the depth of Bing’s acting. The title song was also a favorite record of both my Grandfather and myself. Being raised in the Great Depression, to my Grandfather the song and the movie represented hope and optimism for better times to come.

This was Crosby’s first independent production jointly with Emanuel Cohen’s Major Pictures and he had a share in the profits. The film was distributed by Columbia Pictures. The movie was Bing’s most dramatic effort to date. In the film, Bing plays a sort of roving vagabond. The opening scene in the movie, find Bing incarcerated (not sure why), and he was visited by a fellow inmate going to the electric chair for a murder he committed. For a man on death row, the warden and guards are pretty relaxed on how they are treating this murderer. Anyways, he hands Bing a letter to deliver, and being a man of his word, Bing promises to deliver the letter. 

The letter is for the family of the man that convict murdered. The only family left is the murdered man’s daughter (Edith Fellows) and her grandfather (Donald Meeks). To make up for killing a man, the death row inmate gave the family keys to his rundown hideout. Being that the daughter and grandfather are pretty much homeless they decide to move into the house of the man that murdered their father/son. Bing wants to cut out as soon as he delivers the letter, but he gets involved in the life of the daughter and grandfather and the social worker (Madge Evans) that tries to make sure the daughter is cared for.

Of course, the star of the film is Bing; whose singing makes one forgets that he basically plays a hobo in this film! The great scene stealer in the film though was child star Edith Fellows. A noted child star of the 1930s, she later had a long second career on stage and television. Abandoned at age two months she was raised by her grandmother, initially in Charlotte, North Carolina, and pushed into show business early. She appeared with many of the greats of the 1930s like Bing, WC. Fields, and Tony Martin, but by the 1950s, stage fright had consumed her. She retired to roles in television and movies in the 1970s. However, seeing Edith in 1936’s Pennies From Heaven, you would never imagine she would have problems in life. Bing starred with many child stars through the years, but the relationship and chemistry between Bing and Edith Fellows was by far the most believable.

The whole cast of Pennies From Heaven was strong. Bing fought for his idol Louis Armstrong to have a role in the movie, and more than the normal stereotypical roles that African-Americans had to take in Hollywood in the 1930s. Although this was not the first time that a black performer was given prominent billing in a major Hollywood release (Paul Robeson had been billed fourth in that same year's Show Boat), special billing was given to Armstrong at the insistence of Bing Crosby, who also insisted on Armstrong's being hired for the movie. Rounding out the cast was the beautiful Madge Evans as the uptight social worker. It seems like that was the love story aspect of all Bing’s early films: laidback crooner falls for uptight socialite. Donald Meeks as the grandfather was perfectly cast. Meeks never made a bad appearance in a movie, and he appeared in over 100 films! TO BE CONTINUED...

BING IN HOLLYWOOD: THE 1930s

Many movie goers these days consider the movie musical to be nothing more than fluff and fantasy. Most people in real life do not break out in song. That is true, but for moviegoers of the 1930s and 1940s the movie musical was an escape. It was an escape from the pain of poverty during the Great Depression, and it was an escape from the horrors of World War II. Of all the stars during that era, it was Bing Crosby that introduced the most standards. He was the voice of the times.

Bing started out as a singer with the Rhythm Boys in Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, and then he moved on to making a series of film shorts for Mack Sennett. Those shorts were corny and really were only used to spotlight Bing’s singing, but it got him more popular exposure. Not only did he become a star on radio, but he was also signed to a long term contract with Paramount Studios. He would remain at the studio for almost 25 years.

The first movie Bing made for the studio was The Big Broadcast in 1932. The film was basically a spotlight of the popular radio stars of the day with a light plotline in between the songs. Crosby got to introduce some great songs like “Dinah”, “Please”, and the underrated torch song “Here Lies Love”. Bing basically played himself, and he did not really stretch his acting chops in this film. My favorite role in the movie was Bing’s friend, played by comedian Stuart Erwin. The movie catapulted Bing to movie stardom, and he followed it up with a more forgettable movie – 1933’s College Humor. The film was not bad, but even a young 30 year old Bing could not pass for a college student. He did get to sing the great song “Learn To Croon”, which became Bing’s unofficial anthem in those early years. More flimsy films followed in the 1930s, but he introduced a great standard in each of them. In She Loves Me Not (1934), Bing introduced “Love In Bloom”, in Here In My Heart (1935), Bing sang “June In January”, and in Two For Tonight (1935) Bing introduced “Without A Word Of Warning”.

Going back to Bing’s third movie in 1933, he was loaned to MGM Studios for the splashy musical Going Hollywood. It would be one of the best of the earlier Bing films. He was reunited with Stuart Erwin, his love interest was the older Marion Davies, and he got to sing some wonderful Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed tunes like: “Temptation”, “Our Big Love Scene”, and “Beautiful Girl”. Bing would not return to the studio until 1956, and it was the first of only four movies Bing made for the studio. With Bing Crosby being such a big and rising star, I am really surprised Paramount Studios loaned him out in the 1930s as much as they did.

The movie roles remained forgettable until Bing was loaned out again to Columbia Studios in 1936. For the movie Pennies From Heaven, Bing had his most dramatic role yet as an ex-convict who “adopted” a young child of another convict. It was still not Citizen Kane, but Bing had a lot more to do in this movie than just sing and play a crooner. He also introduced the title song, and a few other great songs like “So Do I”, and “Let’s Call A Heart A Heart”. When Bing went back to Paramount though, he went back to the flimsy musicals, which were quite popular with movie audiences.

Fast forwarding to 1939, Bing made a favorite movie of mine to end the decade. He played real life songwriter and kid show producer Gus Edwards in the movie “biography” The Star Maker. Bing sang some vintage songs, even vintage for 1939, like “School Days” and “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now”, while he got to sing the new song “Still The Bluebirds Sing”. The film was another example that Bing was feeling more sure of himself as an actor and could play roles other than a carefree crooner. By making movies like Pennies From Heaven and The Star Maker, Bing was paving the way for meatier roles in the 1940s and even roles that would recognized by the Academy Awards. Bing never could have imagined that back when he was making movies playing a 30 year old college co-ed…

GUEST REVIEWER: PENNIES FROM HEAVEN

For the guest review this month we have Jeremy Arnold from Turner Classic Movies to profile a great Bing film from the 1930s...

After shooting Rhythm on the Range (1936), Bing Crosby exercised an option in his Paramount contract that allowed him to make an independent film away from his home studio. He teamed up with former Paramount producer Emanuel Cohen, and before even picking a script, title or score, they reached a distribution agreement with Columbia's Harry Cohn. Each of the three parties would own a third of the project. Now they settled on a property - a 1913 novel by Katherine Leslie Moore called The Peacock's Feather, which they hired Jo Swerling to adapt into the script Pennies from Heaven (1936). (Swerling would later write Leave Her to Heaven, 1945, and It's a Wonderful Life, 1946.)

By the mid-1930s, few Hollywood musicals were acknowledging the Great Depression on screen, preferring stories and settings of the rich and glamorous. Pennies from Heaven was an exception. While it certainly feels like a typically breezy vehicle for Crosby, with his easygoing character wandering into a trifle of a story, there are glimpses of the tough times at hand. In jail as the story begins, Crosby is asked by a condemned prisoner to look after his little girl when Crosby gets out, and to move her and her grandfather into an old family estate. The place is spooky and the family needs money, so naturally Crosby turns the property into a restaurant/nightclub called the Haunted House Cafe - conveniently providing a fine excuse for musical numbers.

Pennies from Heaven is not full of out-and-out song classics, but its score by Johnny Burke and Arthur Johnston is enjoyable and features "One, Two, Button Your Shoe," "So Do I," "Let's Call a Heart a Heart," "Now I've Got Some Dreaming To Do," and of course the title song, which was nominated for an Oscar® but lost to Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields's "The Way You Look Tonight," from Swing Time. (What an embarrassment of riches the Best Song category was in those days.)

Johnny Burke's collaboration with Crosby was the beginning of an important artistic partnership. As Crosby later wrote, "one of the best things that's happened to me is a one hundred and forty-five pound Irish leprechaun named Johnny Burke." While Burke had had a bit of success in the music industry and had done some minor work-for-hire at Twentieth Century Fox, he was essentially new to the movies. Crosby liked him immediately and decided to give him a chance on Pennies from Heaven. They would become good friends, and for seventeen years Burke was Crosby's personal songwriter, penning such classics as "Moonlight Becomes You," "I've Got a Pocketful of Dreams," "What's New?," and "Swinging on a Star." The song "Pennies from Heaven" was shot live with a full orchestra on the soundstage, instead of pre-recorded as was the norm. The track became so popular that it set new highs in national record sales, and it was covered by many other artists in the years following.

Another musical highlight is "Skeleton in the Closet," performed by Louis Armstrong in the Haunted House Cafe with Lionel Hampton on the drums. Armstrong had had an enormous influence on Crosby's singing style ("He is the beginning and the end of music in America," said Crosby) and now that Crosby had some clout, he wanted to give back a little by featuring Armstrong in the movie. According to Crosby biographer Gary Giddins, Harry Cohn balked at this request, "seeing no reason to entail the expense of flying him in and having no desire to negotiate with Armstrong's crude, mob-linked but devoted manager, Joe Glaser. Bing refused to discuss the matter. [Armstrong] was about to make his Hollywood debut."

Not only did Armstrong make his studio feature debut (an earlier independent feature is lost) he shared billing with the three primary stars of the picture - something that had never before been done for a black performer in a mainstream movie. Again, this was Crosby's doing. The prominent billing along with Armstrong's charming performance (he has some comic dialogue scenes, too) did wonders for Armstrong's career. He swiftly became a regular presence in the movies, often playing himself, and for this he was appreciative of Crosby for the rest of his life. As Armstrong said thirty years later, "Here's paying tribute to one of the finest guys in this musical and wonderful world. With a heart as big. Carry on Papa Bing, Ol' Boy!!"

JEREMY'S RATING: NOT GIVEN
MY RATING: 10 OUT OF 10 STARS

SOURCE

PHOTOS OF THE DAY: BING IN THE 1930S

Bing Crosby in the 1930s was like Lady Gaga of the present day. Bing was everywhere in the 1930s, and his rise to popularity has never been equaled. His radio work, his feature movie roles, and well as his marriage and four children - all happened in the decade of the 1930s. Here are some examples of Bing in the 1930s...

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN CO-STAR DIES

Child actress Edith Fellows had made about 30 films when she starred at 13 in a heart-wrenching high-profile, 1936 custody case driven, she later said, by "my money - past, present and future."

Abandoned as an infant by her mother, she was being raised by her paternal grandmother, who brought Edith, then 4, to Hollywood from South Carolina after a "talent scout" guaranteed her a screen test for a $50 fee.

The address they were given led to a vacant lot, and her grandmother responded to the con man's ruse by cleaning houses so that they could afford to stay. Within two years, Edith was cast in her first film, the 1929 short "Movie Night."

She had appeared in such movies as "The Rider of the Death Valley" (1932) with Tom Mix and "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch" (1934) with W.C. Fields when the mother she had not seen for most of a decade came knocking on the door.

When her mother sued her grandmother for custody, Edith testified, "I might be willing to be friends with her if she'd leave me alone, but I'm not used to loving strangers."

Once the two sides agreed that Edith would remain in her grandmother's care, her mother sought an allowance from her daughter. The judge advised taking it up with probate court.

Fellows died of natural causes Sunday at the Motion Picture and Television Fund's retirement home in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, said her only child, Kathy Fields Lander. She was 88.

Yet not everything was as it appeared to be during Edith's courtroom testimony, which ended months before the release of "Pennies From Heaven," a film featuring Edith as an orphan who is befriended by Bing Crosby.

Her off-screen life was tightly controlled by her domineering grandmother, Elizabeth Fellows, who once had stage ambitions and essentially forced her into show business, the actress later recalled.

When Edith was signed by Columbia Pictures in the mid-1930s, studio chief Harry Cohn strongly suggested that her grandmother buy the teen actress some decent clothes.

Forced to choose in court between her grandmother and her mother, Edith had "mixed emotions," she told People magazine in 1984.

Her mother seemed "cold and a little tough," Fellows said in the article, so she chose to stay with the stern hand she already knew.

As a result of the court case, Edith's earnings was placed in a trust. In 1939, the Los Angeles Times reported that her estate might end up worth $150,000 - the equivalent of about $2.3 million today - when she turned 21 and could claim the money.

Instead, her tale took another cinematic turn when she returned from acting in New York theater to collect her childhood income.

When the California bankers handed her a check for $900.60, Fellows thought it was a joke and later recalled asking, "OK, now where's the rest of it?"

Her grandmother wasn't around to ask; she had been dead for several years.

Fellows always blamed the missing thousands on her mother, who said of Edith during the court case: "I saw her in a picture once, but I didn't know she was my daughter."

Edith Marilyn Fellows was born May 20, 1923, in Boston and by 2 months old was under her grandmother's care.

Repeatedly cast as a spoiled brat and a street urchin in the movies, Edith especially enjoyed playing oldest sibling Polly Pepper in the "Little Peppers" film series released in 1939 and 1940, her daughter said.

At 17, Edith was dropped by Columbia and made a handful of films before turning to stage roles that included Broadway.

While performing with the USO, she met talent agent and future studio executive Freddie Fields. They married in 1946, had a daughter and divorced in the mid-1950s.

"She was 4-foot-10, a feisty kind of pixie with a bubbly personality," her daughter said, "and she could sing."

During a 1958 benefit performance in New York, Fellows suffered a physical breakdown that a psychiatrist attributed to "acute stage fright," partly due to being forced into a life of performing, she recounted in 1984 in People.

Her second marriage, to a management consultant, ended after several years when he tried to push her back into show business, she told the magazine.

Penniless and depressed, Fellows spent several years as an operator for answering services, dependent on alcohol and tranquilizers, she later recalled.

After she returned to Los Angeles around 1970, a friend wrote a play, "Dreams Deferred," based on Fellows life and asked her to star in it. It helped her return to acting, onstage and in television and film.

Opening in it "was like going through a doorway," she told People in 1984. "I just knew that I was home."

Fellows is survived by a family of actors - her daughter Kathy, who is married to David Lander, who played Squiggy on TV's "Laverne & Shirley"; and her granddaughter, Natalie Lander...