Heaven Can Wait (1978)

My stepmom took me to see this movie when it came out, and I'm sure she explained how it was a remake, not of Heaven Can Wait (1943), but of Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

In the years since, I've seen Mr. Jordan, and Heaven a few times, and Mr. Beatty's remake is really well done. He hits all the notes of the original, while fitting the plot neatly into the film world of the then-present. Dyan Cannon and Charles Grodin work the adulterous Mrs. Farnsworth and her lover neatly into the murder mystery farces that were then so popular. And should be again.

But anyway, everybody bitches about remakes, but they've been part of the movie picture since the beginning, and this a particularly good one.


And if you haven't seen the original Mr. Jordan, I would highly recommend it. It stars the fabulous Robert Montgomery, the father of the late Miss Elizabeth Montgomery, who we Space Race–Era babies remember as Samantha of Bewitched.

Any devotee of Bewitched or Ms. Montgomery in general can look at that photo on the right and see how much she looked like her daddy. And he was brilliant. It's a crime that he's largely been forgotten.

He started out playing Park Avenue playboys, but he wanted something more, so he took a role in The Big House, as yet another Park Avenue playboy who's been busted big-time, and accepts his fate.

It was his breakout role, and he went on to play an Irish serial killer and a PT boat commander.

He parlayed his stardom and WWII heroism into a chance to direct, and made fucked-up fantastic films like Ride The Pink Horse and Lady In the Lake, the latter innovative for its use of the camera as a substitute for the protagonist.

He was a Republican, but that meant different things back then. He was definitely elitist, if you've read the stories of the formation of the Screen Actors' Guild. But he really had been a PT boat commander, and his post–War work, like that of other pre–War pretty boys like Tyrone Power, belied a new seriousness.

He invented the entire concept of media training for Dwight Eisenhower, and smirked bitterly at the Nixon-Kennedy debate, saying that if Nixon had hired him, he woulda won.

He was probably right. And thank God Nixon didn't hire him.

Montgomery was so much smarter than Karl Rove. Because he loved people.