Matts' Big Oscar Challenge Day 234: There's No Beating Beatty

It's been a while but I'm back on the Oscar trail and determined to at least get to the end of the 1980s by the end of the year. The next four reviews are going to be hazy recollections as I watched them last autumn and stupidly didn't write anything down about them at the time.

The first of the four is Heaven Can Wait a remake, not of the 1940s film Heaven Can Wait, but rather then 1940s film Here Comes Mr Jordan both of which have previously been reviewed on this site. This remake sees Robert Montgomery's baseball player being replaced by Warren Beatty's quaterback Joe Pendleton whose motorcycle ends up colliding with a truck with the result being him taken up to heaven by an over-zealous Guardian Angel. As with the original 1940s film Mr Jordan, here played by James Mason, finds a new body for Joe in the form of billionaire Leo Farnsworth. Joe, as Farnsworth, surprises the current Mrs Farnsworth and the old man's business manager as the pair had recently finished killing him off. But Farnsworth's revival results in them ultimately being rumbled for the crime. Elsewhere Joe falls for environmentalist Betty Logan who has come to Farnsworth industries to complain about their unscrupulous activities. Despite the age difference, Betty soon falls for Farsnworth also buys Joe's old team and tries to make himself quarterback. Obviously, anybody who's seen one of the three versions of the film knows exactly how it will end, but I'm not going to spoil it for you here.

It's very rare in this day and age that a comedy makes its way into the Best Picture line-up and it was in the 1970s that the genre began to disappear altogether from the Academy Awards nominations. I personally feel that Heaven Can Wait got into the Best Picture list due to its star power rather than its comic ability. Alongside Beatty, who was actually pretty good throughout, the all-star cast included Julie Christie, James Mason and Charles Grodin. I do feel that Christie in particular was given little to do aside from standing around and playing the love interest. Though there were some changes made to the characters from the original film version, the pivotal parts of the plot remained the same. The question then has to be why remake it in the first place? The only reason I can possibly offer is that cinematic effects had moved on quite significantly since the early 1940s and, to be fair, the supernatural elements of the plot were more visually spectacular than they had been thirty years ago. The film received a shocking ten nominations at the awards as a whole but only picked up one, a slightly deserving nod for the grandiose art direction. Overall Heaven Can Wait is a decent enough comedy, but to me really didn't feel like one of the best five films from any year.

Next up we have two offerings from a director who is known for his sharp wit and ensemble casts.