Heaven Can Wait

Wait, didn’t we review this already?  Nope, there are two Best Picture nominations named Heaven Can Wait, one in 1943 and the other here in 1978.  In the earlier Heaven Can Wait, a man tells his life story to Satan.  Here is a completely different story, the remake of the 1941 film, Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

Joe Pendleton (Warren Beatty) has just become starting quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams.  While he is out for a bike ride, he is about to be in a horrific crash, but The Escort (Buck Henry) in charge of taking Joe to the other side takes him just before the crash, to lessen Joe’s suffering.  Big mistake, it seems that Joe would have lived through it and was not scheduled to die for another fifty years.  Now Joe feels cheated and angry because he had his heart set on taking the Rams to the Super Bowl.  So Mr. Jordan (James Mason) promises to find him a new body to occupy, one that he can play football in.  They find a millionaire, Leo Farnsworth, who’s just been poisoned by his wife and accountant.  Joe steps into his body to help a young woman, Betty Logan (Julie Christie), and is suddenly in charge of a huge corrupt company and makes some changes, which includes buying the Rams so he can try out for quarterback.

Compared to how fun and zany Here Comes Mr. Jordan was, this remake feels like a bunch of garbage.  Though the plot is basically the same, it feels so outlandish and silly, somehow I couldn’t take it seriously.  The characters are way too flimsy.  Mr. Farnsworth’s murders are just dopey lovers who run around like headless chickens until they find a new means of murder.  And this Joe is just a football jock.  The heart that Robert Montgomery gave him in Here Comes Mr. Jordan seems to have been muted and forgotten.  He’s dead up in clouds but he runs around with a soprano sax and does pushups because that’s all he knows.  It’s a cute little motif and his big halftime pep talk in a board meeting is amusing enough, but it’s harebrained.  I never felt that Here Comes Mr. Jordan was this silly.  The whole thing goes way too far once he buys the Rams.

Once this film hit its final act, I could see every event right to the end (not just because this is a remake) and it takes too long to get there.  I became annoyed with the whole eye being a portal to the soul reference; do we really need to watch people stare at each other so much?  That idea came through perfectly in Here Comes Mr. Jordan without a staring contest.  There needs to be a rule that when an ending is so blatantly obvious it shouldn’t be so stretched out unless you can create some decent suspense.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan worked wonders in 1943, but somehow the charm and heart was lost in this remake.  Maybe it was entertaining enough in 1978, but honestly, I think this film is better off parodied by South Park.  The jokes would be funnier and we would not be pressured to take Beatty’s version of Joe so seriously.  I would love to see a little wide-eyed construction paper Joe running around in the clouds, carrying his soprano sax saying in a South Park voice:

“I gotta get the Rams to the Super Bowl!”

Here Comes Mr. Jordan

When Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery), a good hearted boxer, looks like he is about to die, Messenger 7013 (Edward Everett Horton) acts too quickly removing his soul from his body to spare him the agony.  This is a huge mistake, as it turns out that Joe was supposed to live for fifty more years.  When Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), the guy running this foggy afterlife world, hears of the mishap, he sets out to find Joe a new body to inhabit for his allotted fifty years.

Joe is pretty picky over the bodies Mr. Jordan shows him and with good reason.  He had worked hard to get himself into peak physical condition, which he calls “in the pink” and does not want to give up on his boxing dreams.  When Mr. Jordan shows him Mr. Farnsworth, a millionaire who is about to be murdered by his wife, he sees an opportunity to help a young woman in need, Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes).  Joe goes into Farnsworth’s body, saying that it will only be temporary and starts using the money at his disposal for good.  When sparks start flying between Joe and Bette, it’s hard for him to move onto a permanent body, but Mr. Jordan assures Joe that he will achieve everything in his original destiny.

While Joe’s soul is transported from one body to another, certain things remain constant that make him recognizable.  To us, the viewer, he does not change physically but we understand that his new body has not, but to he characters who knew Farnsworth the personality strangely has.  He still retains his personality and memories from his life as Joe. This comes in handy when he seeks out his old trainer, Max Corkel (James Gleason).  One physical object of his follows him from body to body, his lucky saxophone.  To the people originally around Farnsworth before his death, this saxophone is a mystery, especially when they see Farnsworth playing it.  I guess as Joe’s soul is transported, so is his knowledge and ability to play.

Underneath this quirky story is an attempt to understand the unknown journey of a soul.  Individually, we all have different ideas on what happens to us after death, but it’s hard to find one universal outlook without getting into a messy philosophical debate.  In the film, we are not shown or told about heaven, hell or angles, the only concrete terms used are soul and body.  Mr. Jordan and Messenger 7013 are just shown to be men in suits, pretty un-mystical despite the fact that they transport souls of the recently deceased.  Even more humbling is the fact that even they can make mistakes, like taking Joe away before he has even crashed.

The philosophies men have created over time are simplified to a modern understanding: each person has an allotted time in their life then their soul is transported out of their body, which is simply a physical shell for the soul.  And when a mistake has been made, Mr. Jordan and his messengers will see to it that you get the time and all you were destined for.  These ideas may not satisfy the deeply religious, but it’s not such a bad gig to find yourself caught in, considering the fiery alternatives.

“I’m following that saxophone!”