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.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 108: Go To Hell?

Going into the future films in 1978 there is a film called Heaven Can Wait starring Warren Beatty which is a remake of a nominated film from the 1940s. Confusingly it isn't my next film, Heaven Can Wait, instead it is Here Comes Mr Jordan which I am yet to watch. This version of Heaven Can Wait sees Don Ameche as wealthy Henry Van Cleve a man who has recently passed away and has come to the 'down below', we're assuming it is hell and that Laird Creagar's character simply referred to as 'His Excellency' is Satan. Creagar doesn't believe that Van Cleve should be there so Van Cleve narrates his life story to 'His Excellency'. At first we the audience believe him to be a rogue, or a cad or a bounder from a young age he is corrupted by his young French governess Mademoiselle and given wine. He then steals the fiancée of his boorish cousin and elopes with her before cheating on her towards their tenth anniversary. But then things turn around and Van Cleve becomes both a loving husband and a good father, at one point trying to pay off the woman who is out to ruin his son's reputation. He loses his wife on the eve of their 25th anniversary and although he is swayed briefly by other women he never gives up loving her. It turns out the reason he doesn't think he belongs upstairs is that he doesn't want to run into his wife and other relatives as he thinks he's let them down therefore truly becoming a good person. 'His Excellency' points out that it won't be easy and he may have to stay on the outskirts in a small apartment but one day Van Cleve will be allowed entry.

Heaven Can Wait had a very promising start with Van Cleve's meeting with 'His Excellency' and his subsequent retelling of his adolescence. 'His Excellency's' office is very well designed almost in an avant-garde style and the first scene does promise almost a black comedy. But then after the Van Cleve character starts becoming a good person things start to lag and the whole segment after he loses his wife is very boring indeed. Despite that there are some good performances notably from Charles Coburn as Van Cleve's Grandfather the only person in his family with any sense, Alyn Joslyn as the horrible cousin and Ameche himself. It is also a very clever story a reversal of the pleading with St. Peter to be let into heaven by trying to convince Satan why you belong in hell. But overall I felt a little bit deflated and that the film didn't have enough faith in its darkly comic premise to follow through. Maybe this is the sort of film that could be remade, but then would the title have to be changed to avoid confusion?