Dennis Potter adapted his screenplay from the BBC series for American audiences, changing its setting from London and the Forest of Dean to Depression-era Chicago and rural Illinois.

They embark on a short affair, but Arthur leaves her and returns to Joan, who is desperate to keep him and agrees to give him the money he wanted.

Having failed to sell his business, Arthur and Eileen break into the store one night and trash it, smashing its phonograph records (except for "Pennies from Heaven").

Around 1989, at the prompting of Alan Yentob, the controller of BBC2, producer Kenith Trodd was able to buy back the rights from MGM for "a very inconsiderable sum."

In the same Times article, Trodd stated that Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell, the stars of the original series, "were terribly upset that they weren't considered for the film.

The style of the movie balances the drab despair of the Depression era and the characters' sad lives with brightly colored dream-fantasy lavish musical sequences.

For example, Eileen turns into a silver-gowned torch singer in her school-room, with her students lip-synching and dancing ("Love Is Good for Anything That Ails You").

[citation needed] "Everything I had done until that time had been wildly successful," he recalled in 1987, "so that the commercial failure of the film caught me by surprise.

"[9] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 64 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

[10] The film was given a rapturous review by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, writing "Pennies from Heaven is the most emotional movie musical I've ever seen.

It's a stylized mythology of the Depression which uses the popular songs of the period as expressions of people's deepest longings—for sex, for romance, for money, for a high good time...there was never a second when I wasn't fascinated by what was happening on the screen.

"[11] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called it "a rejuvenating, landmark achievement in the evolution of Hollywood musicals, and certainly the finest American movie of 1981.

"[14] Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote "'Pennies From Heaven' is one of the most hopelessly esoteric big-budget Hollywood pictures ever made, a lugubrious, neo-Brechtian musical exercise of notable pretension and virtually no artistic payoff...In short, it's 'Penny Gate.

[The 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.

"[17] Peters won the Golden Globe as Best Motion Picture Actress in a Comedy or Musical for her role as Eileen Everson, a schoolteacher turned prostitute.

[18][19] A review of the DVD reissue asserted, "Peters brought a cocky attitude and a sexy exuberance to the musical numbers.

"[7] Fred Astaire, who was powerless to prevent the reuse of the footage from his film Follow the Fleet, detested Pennies from Heaven: "I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life.