1981 Retrospective: Jessica Harper in "Pennies From Heaven"
Friday, April 24, 2020 at 10:49AM Please welcome new contributor Nick Taylor. He's been sharing insightful comments on his reader ballots for years so he now joins the team to talk about Supporting Actresses who weren't nominated to coincide with our upcoming Smackdown events.
The 54th Academy Awards celebrated an insular group for 1981. Only nine films were represented between all four acting categories. If you expand that circle to include the nominations for Picture, Director, and Screenplay it's only a whopping twelve films hogging forty above-the-line slots. Every Supporting Actress nominee (to be discussed soon) had a co-star recognized in a different category. But when you look to performances outside of the nominated shortlist, like Kate Reid in Atlantic City or Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s hard not to wonder why things shook out the way they did.
Or consider Jessica Harper’s perfectly controlled performance in Pennies From Heaven. Adapted from a 1978 British miniseries, Pennies follows song salesman Arthur Parker (Steve Martin, aces as a total cad), who views life through the rose-colored tint of the music he peddles but can’t see the damage he wrecks on others, and whose affair with lovelorn schoolteacher Eileen (Bernadette Peters, winning a Golden Globe for her delicate, nuanced turn) sends both their lives spiraling towards tragedy...