**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Robert Montgomery, Claude Rains, Evelyn Keyes, Rita Johnson
screenplay by Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller, from the play "Heaven Can Wait" by Harry Segall
directed by Alexander Hall
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Here Comes Mr. Jordan shakes your faith in the idea of Hollywood as Dream Factory. It's a film about a prizefighter (Robert Montgomery, playing Joe Pendleton) meeting an untimely end in a plane crash and having his consciousness transferred into the body of a murdered millionaire. (When his plane takes a nosedive via the magic of a camera off its axis, so, too, do the clouds in the sky.) There's a patrician, Mr. Roarke-ish afterlife overseer–the titular Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains)–and much switcheroo'ing involving bodies and identities and romance; it would take quite an effort for this to be less than light on its feet. But despite it all, the film hits the ground with a thud and sits there without a truly fanciful thought in its head. Not only is the script so impressed with itself that you can hear the writers crack up at every single feeble joke, but director Alexander Hall has also decided to shoot everything in cold, wide master shots that see everything and suggest nothing. It must be the least wondrous fantasy in Tinseltown history.
How could this have happened? You want to like a movie about an amiable boxer–dubbed "the flying pug" because he's his own pilot–who makes good after becoming the victim of a divine clerical error. You also want to like the idea of Rains as the St. Peter surrogate who guides him through his transition from boxer to banker–and you really want to like Edward Everett Horton as the fussy angel trainee who made the goof that cost Pendleton his body. It rankles most that the latter actor, so hilarious in countless Astaire/Rogers vehicles, is here rendered annoying primarily through lacking anything funny to say. Rains, too, is a tad insufferable, his character conceived in that saccharine, condescending manner of the classic Hollywood patriarch that makes you want to key his car instead of listening to his sage advice.
Montgomery is ultimately a bit out of his depth here: he's supposed to be a world-class fighter and you can't see him getting very far in the ring. A bigger problem, however, is that nothing exactly has been developed from the concept. Our first clue of this comes in the Heaven-set scenes: it's a little dry ice and an enamel white jetliner to whisk souls to their final destination–hardly the stuff of awe or, moreover, whimsy. Then there's the lackadaisical approach to the machinations of the plot, which aren't played up as much as they ought to be: although the road is sinuous, with Pendleton navigating his new identity while trying to convince various parties that he's not actually the banker, one doesn't get the sense that the filmmakers are enjoying the structure. The surprise elements of the plot are barely commented upon by the director, who doesn't seem to notice anything beyond the rush of bodies and the need to turn in product.
To be fair, that plot–from a play by Harry Segall that almost certainly had to be superior to its screen translation–keeps you from nodding off completely. The geometry of the thing is sound; on some intellectual level, you want to know how the numbers break down and the figures add up. Still, it's nothing you invest in emotionally because nobody else has, either. Romance rears its head in the form of Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes, who's not bad), yet it's shoehorned in amidst those cold lines without a sense of purpose or a beating heart. As it stands, Here Comes Mr. Jordan is outclassed entirely by Powell and Pressburger's subsequent A Matter of Life and Death (a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven): now there was a film with heat in its celestial romance and hearty ironic laughter at the manner in which Heaven operates by its own rules. Its seven Oscar nominations notwithstanding, this pallid fantasy dries up and blows away.
Sony's DVD release of Here Comes Mr. Jordan is as bare-bones as they come–the menu screens even have generic filmstrip graphics that look as if some burning software's "movie" template generated them automatically. But the film itself does not suffer the same neglect, having undergone a restoration supervised by the crack team of preservationists at UCLA; seeing as how there's no before-and-after demonstration, one is inclined to give the curtain of grain the benefit of the doubt and focus on what isn't there, chiefly negative damage and extensive digital processing. Improvements to the soundtrack, presented in Dolby 2.0 mono, are that much less readily apparent, though voices are full and background hiss is nonexistent.
94 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Portuguese, Japanese subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Sony
