The Five Pennies
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Barbara Bel Geddes, Bob Crosby, Danny Kaye, Harry Guardino, Louis ArmstrongBrand: PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 117 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-12-13
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Paramount
Movie Reviews of The Five Pennies
Movie Review: Ogden, Utah - the hotbed of jazz music?
Summary: 5 Stars
Even with my overwhelming fondness for the uproarious THE COURT JESTER, I must admit that my favorite Danny Kaye feature is THE FIVE PENNIES. This film, released in 1959, tells the highly fictionalized but very entertaining biofilm of cornet player Ernest Loring "Red" Nichols (1905-1965) as warmly portrayed by another musically-gifted readhead, Danny Kaye. In its unabashed sentimentaly, fine acting, and timeless jazzy/rag music, THE FIVE PENNIES has never lost its fascination with me, and I've seen it a gazallion times. Danny Kaye, this time out, makes do with less mugging, and, thus, ends up with a warmer, more grounded performance. Oh, he still has moments wherein he resorts to his patented gimmicks of glib double speak and foreign accents, but they're not many.
The film has Nichols writing sheet arrangements which incorporate jazz into the music. From the time when he was merely a lowly cornet player, he's tended to push his ideas perhaps too strongly at people and then having little patience when he is rebuffed. In the movie, he's seen as losing gig after gig because of his unwillingness to adapt to his current place in life, even though he had just gotten married and desperately needed the job. It's a credit to Danny Kaye's likability that the viewer doesn't get annoyed with him and, in fact, the fashion in which he gets axed time and again is played out in a humorous manner. Also, his perfect chemistry with Barbara Bel Geddes as his wife Bobbie and, later on, with Susan Gordon and Tuesday Weld, who respectively play his daughter Dorothy at ages 6 and 14, go a long way to lending Red Nichols empathy from the viewer. The music certainly resonates, but Red's family relationships and his later sacrifice are what gives THE FIVE PENNIES its emotional core. One of many favorite moments in the film is with Danny hanging out late one night with a young, insistently wide-awake Dorothy (Susan Gordon) at their motel room.
The real Red Nichols played the music while Kaye was doing the convincing cornet finger work. I still get chills when Danny Kaye, post vomit in a speakeasy, first plays the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and ends up dueting with Louis Armstrong. Danny's actual wife, songwriter Sylvia Fine, ended up writing four very tuneful songs for this film: "Follow the Leader," the catchy "Lullaby in Ragtime," "Goodnight - Sleep Tight," and "The Five Pennies." Another moment I love is the triple harmonizing amongst Louis, Danny, and Susan Gordon, where three of Fine's songs are seamlessly, gloriously interwoven. And then there's the magnificent "When the Saints Go Marching In" performance, which truly is the highlight of the movie and shows Mr. Kaye nicely holding his own with ol' Satchmo.
When folks think of Danny Kaye nowadays, if they even think of him at all, the movies most closely associated with him are THE COURT JESTER, HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, or THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY. But, to see him at his warmest and most engaging, my money's on THE FIVE PENNIES. Highly, highly recommended.
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