The movie that finally made Christopher Walken believe he was a good actor and changed his life
It’s hard to have an opinion on an actor like Christopher Walken, who’s so synonymous with the very fabric of cinema, having been a big part of many wonderful movies, that it’s like passing a verdict on a chair or a lamp.
His quality has been recognised for so long that sometimes it’s easy to overlook just how great he is, but we’d all be poorer without this furture star, who was born Ronald Walken in 1943, growing up in an aspiring showbiz family, where his mother, Rosalie, was desperate to become an actor, so much so that she ended up naming her son after Ronald Colman, an English silent film star.
He picked up on this energy, and his obsession with performing only intensified when he discovered Elvis Presley, with whom he would be infatuated for the rest of his life, which might be why he held himself to such a high standard from the early days of his career.
In a 1986 interview with journalist Don Shewey from Caught in the Act: New York Actors Face to Face, Walken revealed that he had only recently been able to see himself as a “good” actor, and there was one film in particular that gave him the confidence to accept his god-given talent.
“I was able to control it to some extent about the time I did Pennies from Heaven,” he said, “Something in your biological clock tells you, ‘You better get on the stick’. There’s a point at which I stopped being naïve about myself. Sometimes, a certain innocence is good, but not about yourself. It’s come and gone since then, but I know what it is now. I’ve got my eye on what it is I’m for in show business.”
Released in 1981, Pennies From Heaven is a musical drama from director Herbert Ross, where Steve Martin plays a sheet music salesman who dreams of getting behind the microphone, and his imagination turns the songs he sells to other people, such as popular jazz standards from the 1920s and 1930s, into real performances. As the antagonist, Walken plays Tom, a dangerous pimp who competes with Martin’s character for the affection of a woman named Eileen, played by Bernadette Peters.
Walken wasn’t the only one to highly rate this all-singing, all-dancing affair, as critics absolutely ate it up, with Pauline Kael calling it “the most emotional movie musical I’ve ever seen”, just one of the many positive reviews the film received at the time.
It was also nominated for three Oscars and three Golden Globes, with Peters winning ‘Best Motion Picture Actress, Comedy/Musical’ at the latter. Unfortunately, this was not reflected in the film’s box office score, having grossed just $9.1million from a $22m budget, making it all pennies and no heaven.
Pennies from Heaven might not have raked in the big bucks, but if it made Christopher Walken realise just how good he was, then it doesn’t matter, and while he’d made some absolutely corking films before it, this might just be his most important.
