With much of the world at war (and its smell in the air over here), time was ripe for a light-hearted (or romantic) after-death fantasy; a genre that thrives on wartime loss. So, this superior example of the form was just the ticket in ‘41. Death: if you can’t beat it; fantasize about it. (The world crisis adding something essential missing in Warren Beatty’s weightless 1978 remake, HEAVEN CAN WAIT.) Put together at Columbia Pictures largely by Frank Capra’s old team after he’d left the studio; idea, production, script Sidney Buchman & Everett Riskin (brother of Robert), cinematography Joseph Walker, with Robert Montgomery on loan from M-G-M as a rising prize-fighter whisked prematurely to heaven after a plane crash. Owed a second chance in a fresh body, his heavenly handlers, bumbling Edward Everett Horton and smooth, God-like Claude Rains, come up with a dead millionaire who’s just been drowned in the bathtub by his venal wife and secretary. What a surprise when he walks into the room to meet them and fated match, Evelyn Keyes. She’s there looking for justice for an innocent father framed by these guys. James Gleason gets the role of a lifetime as the confused fight trainer, dramatically charged to help us track what’s going on with body swaps so we can follow action and laughs on a script that remarkably & unobtrusively balances ideas of Free Will vs. Predestination. In the remake, Jack Warden gets the role, and also makes it the best thing in the pic, if perhaps not quite as unexpectedly touching. Irresistible and almost weirdly satisfying in untangling all the metaphysics.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Obviously HEAVEN CAN WAIT/’78 is a natural, but so is Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46 and Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH/’46. Meanwhile back at Columbia, Gleason & Horton repeated their roles in a silly, disappointing followup with Rita Hayworth, DOWN TO EARTH/’47. OR: SOUL/’20, a more recent near copy. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/soul-2020.html
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