This 1981 film drips with a sense of anger and betrayal that seems wildly out of scale to its cause—the discovery (less than original) that musicals don't reproduce social reality. The point is made endlessly, though it's in the film's favor that it's made with seriousness, consideration, and a certain amount of imagination.

Dave Kehr

Chicago Reader

Pennies from Heaven is dazzling and disappointing in equal measure. It's a musical with an idea, and ideas usually have been deadly to the musical, that most gloriously heedless of movie genres.

Roger Ebert

Chicago Sun-Times

Miss Peters is funny and charming lip-synching Helen Kane's I Want to Be Bad, and Mr. Martin is something of a revelation as a danceman. The movie, though, is not easy to respond to. It's chilly without being provocative in any intellectual way.

Vincent Canby

The New York Times