Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

Here Comes Mr. Jordan is an American comedy romance film first released in 1941, directed by Alexander Hall.  The film stars Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes, Claude Rains, Rita Johnson and Edward Everett Horton.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Prize fighter Joe Pendleton is fooling about in his private aeroplane when he loses control and crashes into the ground.  Just before impact, his soul is snatched from his body by an overly enthusiastic angel, Messenger 7013, and taken to the transit point to the next world.  The angel’s superior, Mr Jordan, is none too pleased when he discovers that Joe isn’t scheduled to die for another fifty years and hastily takes the young boxer back to Earth so that he can live out the rest of his life.  Unfortunately, Joe’s body has been cremated by his manager, Max Corkle, and the only solution is for Joe to take up residence in another body.  Having rejected various candidates, Joe finally agrees to take the body of a millionaire banker named Farnsworth, who has just been murdered by his wife and secretary.  He does this so that he can help Miss Logan, a young woman whose father has been imprisoned for selling worthless stock given to him by Farnsworth.  Just as Joe realises he is in love with Miss Logan, Mr Jordan reappears and tells him that he must move on to another body, since the one he currently occupies is about to be killed again...

An imaginative and ever so slightly bonkers screenplay, together with some suitably bravura performances, makes Here Comes Mr. Jordan a wonderfully entertaining excursion into the fantasy-comedy genre.  Claude Rains exudes a slick sinister charm as the body-snatching angel-in-chief, trying to look the model of bureaucratic efficiency as his incompetent underling, Edward Everett Horton, bungles his celestial duties, to our amusement. 

In what is possibly his best comedic role, Robert Montgomery is both sympathetic and hilarious as the knuckleheaded saxophone-playing boxer who finds himself shunted from body to body as his guardian angels try to rectify their error.  The plot may be fantastic, often to the point of surreal, but somehow the impeccable performances and writing make the story just about believable and, in a few sequences, highly poignant.

The film was based on Harry Segall’s play Heaven Can Wait (not to be confused with Ernst Lubitsch’s 1943 film of the same title).   It was followed by the sequel, Down to Earth (1947), in which Edward Everett Horton reprised the role of Messenger 7013.  Warren Beatty remade the first film as Heaven Can Wait in 1978, but this version lacked the charm and sharp tongue-in-cheek wit of the original film, which won two Oscars (in the Best Original Story and Best Screenplay categories) and is a classic of its kind.

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