Rent Heaven Can Wait (1943)

Comic Fantasy. - Heaven Can Wait review by Steve

Nostalgic social comedy which was legendary director Ernst Lubitsch's only completed film in glorious Technicolor. It's a life story which begins in the 1880s and extends into the 20th Century as the boy grows up into Don Ameche, a wealthy libertine who presents at the gates of hell to explain why he deserves to be admitted.

And the irony is that the devil's receptionist (Laird Cregar) is smooth talked just like everyone in his privileged life. Mainly women. Or alternatively, that in a time of social puritanism, we feel guilt for our normal human impulses. The whole film is saturated in a woozy haze of whimsy as the newly deceased describes his misdemeanours.

Gene Tierney- as his wife- is top billed but doesn't appear in the first half hour. Ameche is handsome and she is beautiful and their opiated performances give the fantasy the resonance of a dream. Though they are upstaged by Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main as her feuding parents and Clarence Muse as their stoical domestic help.

Some period details are now obscure. And it's a comedy with few laughs. Where it excels is the extraordinarily literate script which accumulates a momentum that elevates the whole film into poetry. It's an exercise in the art of romantic flirtation and a monument to Lubitsch's longtime screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson.

Hell’s Reception, with Perfect Manners - Heaven Can Wait review by griggs

My third Lubitsch in a month, and I’d half-expected the streak to wobble. Instead, Heaven Can Wait hooks you immediately: Henry strolls into Hells’s reception area and calmly argues he belongs there, while Laird Cregar’s “His Excellency” listens like a man enjoying the best audition of the day.

The rest is Henry’s life, told in flashback with proper Technicolour polish — rich interiors, perfect manners, and small emotional bruises that creep up when you’re not watching. It’s not a laugh-a-minute job; the humour is dry and polite, and the warmth arrives almost by stealth. Don Ameche holds it together beautifully: charming, vain, and somehow still human. 

The marriage is the most interesting part — messy, believable, occasionally sad — though I kept wishing the film would spend more time following Gene Tierney’s point of view. And the episodic structure can feel like a series of excellent scenes rather than one clean reckoning. Still, it lands lightly, and that’s Lubitsch’s whole trick.

“Do you think I’m the kind of girl who would take a boy’s last beetle?” - Heaven Can Wait review by LJ

Boring supernatural comedy about a dead man trying to convince the Devil that he deserves to go to Hell. He should get sent to Hell for wasting everyone’s time with his lame not-evil story.