Film review: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

It's very confusing: there's a film starring Warren Beatty called Heaven Can Wait that came out in 1978.  I know I've seen at least parts of it at some point, and I remember the basic plot, and I also knew it was a remake.  So a while ago, I found that there was a 1943 Heaven Can Wait on the Criterion Channel, so we watched it.  But it has very little to do with the Beatty film.  Now I find that the real original version is called Here Comes Mr. Jordan.  But, just to be extra-confusing, it's based on a play called... Heaven Can Wait.  Anyway, you probably know the plot, but just in case: contending boxer Joe Pendleton is in training for the fight-before-the-title-fight but decides to fly there.  His trainer, Max Corkle, wishes he wouldn't, but as Joe says, (1) he isn't called "the flying pug" for nothing, and (2) he'll have his lucky sax along with him. 

Sadly, this isn't enough to save him: he's playing it while flying when some cable snaps and his (one man) plane goes into a nosedive.  Next thing he knows, he's standing on a cloud and a fastidious fusspot is telling him that he's dead.  He refuses to believe it until he's taken to a Mr. Jordan (played by the only actor I recognized, Claude Rains) who is overseeing a bunch of passengers from places like Australia and Finland boarding a large 'plane, which is parked on the cloud. 

Joe is convinced there has been a mistake, though, and on checking the lists, Mr. Jordan discovers that he's not supposed to be there until 1991 (then 50 years in the future).  Turns out that the fusspot is new on the job and snatched Joe from his 'plane just before impact, when he would've been able to pull out of the dive at the last minute.  They take him back to find his body but not only has it been removed from the wreckage, it's been cremated.  So they have to find a new body for him.  He is very particular, because, as he says, he was "in the pink" and he wants a body that can compete for the title.  However, Mr. Jordan is no fool and suggests the body of a rich man called Farnsworth, who was just then being drowned in his bathtub by his wife and secretary.  Joe didn't want to do it until he witnesses a beautiful woman, Bette Logan

(played by an actress I was unfamiliar with, Evelyn Keyes, whose main claim to fame other than this film was playing Scarlett's bratty sister in Gone With the Wind, but who later found fame with some very racy autobiographies detailing her many famous affairs) pleading with the wife and secretary to save her father, who has been set up by the deceased Farnsworth to take the fall in some scandal of his own making.  So Joe takes over Farnsworth's body and sets to work setting things right and training for the fight.  He also falls for Bette.  But alas, the wife and the secretary are not done plotting his demise...

Very entertaining.  The best character is probably Max,

whom Joe manages to explain his predicament to (he is convinced when he hears the now Farnsworth playing his favorite tune on Joe's saxophone and mangling it just as Joe always did).  Bittersweet ending, though, especially if you subscribe to a Lockean theory of personal identity...

(Incidentally, apparently the main actor, Robert Montgomery [whom we decided looked and sounded like a much less handsome Tony Curtis] was not only a well-known leading man, he usually played suave sophisticates, so his pug-from-Brooklyn act was really an act (and got him an Oscar nomination), he was also the father of Samantha from Bewitched.  Oh, and Evelyn described him as a "cold fish" in her scandalous memoirs, so obviously he was one of the few who was immune to her charms.)