Rent The Five Pennies (1959)

Of Bandstand and Shipyard - The Five Pennies review by CH

“Boy, before the evening's over, I might poison him.”

“I'll toss you for it!”

Such is the exchange between two Broadway showgirls on the pavement in Twenties Manhattan after they have been introduced to a gag-laden, straw-chewing Danny Kaye who had just arrived from hixville to ply his cornet in a band which plays to audiences in a swanky hotel. He persuades them to head to Harlem and hear a hot player (Louis Armstrong), with which one of them (Barbara Bel Geddes) afterwards falls in love with him during a taxi ride southwards.

All this, some two decades making for the two hours of The Five Pennies (1959), is based upon the life of Red Nichols, who himself supplied the soundtrack for the fingering well mimicked on screen by Kaye. Manny Farber wrote of it at the time, “even a schmaltzy jazz delight like Danny Kaye's hot cornet film The Five Pennies, has a solidity and thoroughness that belongs in an Encyclopedia Britannica discussion of post-Dixieland music”.

As musical bio-pics go, this might not rank as highly as Love Me or Leave Me, Young Man With a Horn and Yankee Doodle Dandy but Kaye's is a bravura performance whose comedy is given heft by his on-the-road, card-playing life being transformed by news that his daughter Dorothy has fallen victim to polio (a growing rôles shared so well by Susan Gordon, who died soon after Nichols's daughter, and Tuesday Weld).

Talking of which, Kaye and Barbara Bel Geddes talk during a dance-hall scene of having “a real corny, old-fashioned family”; with which, she informs him that she is “three months' corny”, which appears to be a one-off term for pregnant.

How well is this film now known? It provides more than enough to make one want to see more of Danny Kaye.