Here Comes Mr. Jordan – 1941
Well, I’ll start off by saying that this was a movie that had the potential to be good, but it just wasn’t. The plot was, without putting too fine a point on it, dumb. It just seemed like they were making things up as they went along. Circumstances and characters did things that didn’t make sense except to make the plot convenient. It left me rolling my eyes and shaking my head in disbelief.
But it was a fantasy movie, so I really need to cut it a little slack. After all, fantasy films are allowed to make up their own rules. But this film, dare I say it, was not very realistic. It contradicted its own rules left and right, and left loose threads at the end that stuck in my craw. I’ll explain.
The film starred Robert Montgomery as Joe Pendleton, a boxer who has a shot at the world championship title. He is flying to New York to prepare for the fight, piloting his own one-man plane, when a malfunction causes the plane to crash. In order to save Joe a painful death, Messenger 7013, an inept angel who is new to his job of collecting souls, played by Edward Everett Horton, takes Joe to heaven before the plane hits the ground.
But that was the snafu. Joe was not fated to die in the crash. Already, I am not liking the basic concept of the plot. In my biased opinion, angels don’t make mistakes. But never-mind that. Remember, fantasies can make up their own rules. So Messenger 7013 takes Joe to his supervisor, Mr. Jordan, played by Claude Rains. Mr. Jordan decides to return Joe to earth, letting him inhabit the body of a person who is about to die since his own body was cremated. But Joe is so obsessed with boxing that he refuses to accept any body that is not in perfect physical condition, as his own had been. Joe turns down hundreds of candidates.
This causes Messenger 7013 to become so irritated with him that the two develop a hateful relationship. Angels do not hate. But never-mind that. Infinitely patient, but showing signs of frustration and fatigue, Mr. Jordan takes him to the home of a millionaire who is about to be murdered. The doomed man is one Mr. Farnsworth. Joe reluctantly agrees to take the body, but only after he sees how evil the murderers are, and how the shady millionaire was victimizing the beautiful young girl, Bette Logan, played by Evelyn Keyes.
It is implied that the murderers, Mrs. Julia Farnsworth, played by Rita Johnson, and Tony Abbott, Farnsworth’s secretary, played by John Emery are having an affair. And finally, the last notable member of the cast, Joe’s boxing manager, Max Corkle, who he contacts as the millionaire Mr. Farnsworth, and to whom he reveals his big secret, is played by James Gleason.
I don’t know. There were just too many silly ideas like how he was able to hold on to his saxophone which should have been in the wreckage of the plane crash with his dead body. But he has it in heaven, and it mysteriously appears in his hand when he takes over Farnsworth’s body. Then when he loses that body and goes into another one, he still has it.
Then when Joe tells Corkle where Farnsworth’s body is, after Julia and Abbott murder it a second time, Corkle tells the police. And the police never even question how he knew where the body was hidden? He would have been a suspect! Forget the fact that Corkle now had concrete knowledge of the afterlife.
Then there was the point that Farnsworth was a banker. Joe didn’t know the first thing about banking. He would not have been able to pass himself off as a banker. He wouldn’t have fooled anybody. For that matter, he was generally portrayed as a man who was a little low on smarts. What was he doing flying an airplane in the first place?
I can forgive a lot in a film, but this movie just had too many faults for me. I couldn’t get over them. But like I said, the overall concept was a good one. It was just the execution that was poor. However, it wasn’t the actors’ faults. It was the script writer. I can’t explain why Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller’s script was so highly praised, even going so far as to win Oscars for Best Writing, Original Story and Best Writing, Screenplay. I’m sorry but they wouldn’t have gotten my vote.