Here Comes Mr Jordan

The source for Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (1978) has Robert Montgomery as a saxophone-playing prizefighter taken to Heaven by mistake after a plane crash and then returning to Earth in another man’s body  (and later, another's) as his own had been cremated.The kick is that the other man is a crooked business tycoon,Farnsworth, who is in the process of being murdered by his wife (Rita Johnson) and her lover (John Emery.  Keen to get on with his life and win the championship title. Joe takes over Farnsworth's body and begins whipping it into shape but Farnsworth's wife still wants him dead

The film is initially enjoyable for the usually urbane Montgomery’s against-type performance as the good-natured pug, Joe Pendleton, however there’s little else to carry the film other than its convoluted plot which features the usual roster of mugging characters of comedies of this period including Edward Everett Horton and James Gleason. The always urbane Claude Rains plays Mr Jordan, the celestial manager who has to sort out the mix-up.

Harry Segall won an Oscar for his original story and Seton I Miller and Sidney Buchman got one for their adaptation of it but it is very dated stuff and probably purely for nostalgia buffs.

 

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