(3 of 3)
There is one moment of real magic when Larry is singing So Do I, best of the John Burke-Arthur Johnston ballads, in a dim courtyard, strumming his lute, while Patsy revolves around him in a grotesquely graceful, childish dance. Screenwriter Jo Swerling, however, quickly dropped development of the Pennies from Heaven idea. He set his characters to making a haunted house into a night club, then switched to a carnival background, then to an orphan asylum. The thread on which the latter episodes are strung consists of Susan Sprague's (Madge Evans) efforts to put Patsy in the orphan home and win the love of Crosby. By that time even such good songs as One, Two— Button Your Shoe and Let's Call a Heart a Heart are beginning to suffer from the audience's apprehension that the next sequence may be pennies from heaven in a submarine, or pennies from heaven with the Spanish Revolution. Best bit: black Louis Armstrong with his band rendering "Skeleton in the Closet."