Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall, 1941)

 

Officially, Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan is only seven minutes shorter than Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s 1978 remake Heaven Can Wait, but feels much tighter than the later film, sometimes to the point of seeming to rush: for example it sets-up the dimension-crossing romance at its centre in a mere few minutes of screen time, whereas the later version productively lingered at least a little longer. Notwithstanding that broad impression though, and leaving aside Beatty/Henry’s main tweak of making the protagonist Joe Pendleton a football player rather than a boxer, the two follow very similar trajectories, with an almost identical arrival point, both in tone and content. In both versions, Pendleton is killed in an accident (a plane in the original, a bike in the remake), denying him a chance at an upcoming sporting triumph. The administration of the afterlife concedes an error and sends him back, but into the body of a rich industrialist murdered by his wife and secretary; Pendleton rapidly overhauls the man’s cold-hearted public image, along the way turning a bitter young adversary into a star-crossed love. As the change of title may herald, the otherworldly Mr. Jordan is a more prominent presence in the original than the remake, its impact more fully conditioned on the interplay of Robert Montgonery’s pugnacious Pendleton and Claude Rains’ unflappably genial Jordan. Although further point-to-point relative evaluations of the two are largely subjective, the remake certainly does more with the murderous duo by casting Charles Grodin and Dyan Cannon, albeit both under-utilized – the characters in the original barely register as more than plot devices. Pendleton’s friend and trainer Max Korkle is a highlight of both, James Gleason snappy and short-fused in the original, Jack Warden in the remake more slow-burn befuddled (and benefiting from additional time spent on establishing the Pendleton/Korkle relationship).