Movie Review – Heaven Can Wait

Heaven Can Wait (1943)
Written by Samson Raphaelson
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

I thought this was the film Warren Beatty’s 1978 Heaven Can Wait was based on. I was wrong. That film was a remake of 1941’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Why Beatty chose to title his movie after a well-known Ernst Lubitsch film while it was a remake of something else does not have an answer I could find. What makes it even more confounding is that both films have an element of fantasy & the afterlife. They play out in wildly different ways, but in the first fifteen minutes of this movie, I wondered when I’d start to see similarities with the ’70s film. Then, I checked Wikipedia and found my answer. I wish I could say I enjoyed Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait more, but it had some rough spots.

Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche) has died and arrived at his final destination. The film doesn’t name it, but it’s not Heaven, and the man he meets with isn’t God. “His Excellency” (Laird Cregar), as the film names him, is willing to hear Henry’s petition to enter based on his testimony of what a horrible person he was in life. Henry grows up the son of a wealthy family and develops a taste for showgirls, much to his parents’ chagrin. That changes one day when he overhears a woman (Gene Tierney) lying to her mother on a payphone. He’s intrigued and follows her into a bookstore where he pretends to be an employee to learn more about her. Her name is Martha, and she’s engaged to his cousin Albert. 

Henry won’t give up on Martha, and she eventually leaves Albert, which creates ripples throughout the family. Henry and Martha eventually have a son, and things seem happy. However, she learns that he has been cheating on her almost the entire marriage. She runs away, he pursues, and she eventually comes back. The film comes to a strange conclusion where Henry still cheats, but Martha stops caring and is devoted to this unfaithful husband. I think I get the comedy here, but there are some wildly dated & fucked up messages about love in this movie.

The fact that Henry was in Hell made me think the film was commenting on what a bad person he was. However, the final scene where Satan says Henry just didn’t do anything that bad and his wife and grandpa are waiting for him in Heaven struck me as weird. The movie appears to absolve Henry of being a bad person by cheating. The final scenes with Martha are also awkward, as she smiles and says that she knows Henry loves her and doesn’t want to know about the cheating. He doesn’t seem to feel guilty about it at all, either. Martha dies first, and Henry’s last scene while alive is making eyes with a young nurse who comes to the house. The film seems to think this is all funny and charming the whole time. I was a bit surprised.

I think what’s going on here is a more contemporary view of marriage as an equal commitment by both partners with what marriage often was for a long time. In the older version of marriage, men were simply expected to cheat, and the wife was expected to eventually just accept it. This correlated with the backward ideas that men had much higher sex drives than women, and so the husband had to seek out sex with others. That is, of course, utter bullshit, and libidos vary from person to person from a host of factors. Henry would have been a typical husband, especially for his economic class. The wealthy have always been afforded more moral leeway in Western society, their money seemingly a sign that they are “better” than the rest of humanity.

I can see the picture from a different angle, a pushback against the Puritanical Hays Code that limited the content of Lubitsch’s films. The moral of Heaven Can Wait is that being a lazy, immoral person is not enough to condemn you to eternal damnation. If we go back to the book ends of the film, they concern Henry petitioning Satan to be let into Hell because he believes that’s where he belongs. The Hays Code would agree that a character like Henry should be shown suffering so that the “correct moral message” was sent to the audience. 

We find similar characters if you look at a show like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We are never meant to hate them, but we certainly aren’t being encouraged to emulate them. We laugh at them but at the same time, are expected to see humanity in them. Think of Mac’s dance performance/coming out to his dad. This moment produces a lot of empathy for a character we laugh at most of the time. I do think it’s important because, as an American, I come from such a Puritanical society to understand that not all “sins” are equal. I would never cheat on my wife, but someone who cheats on their partner doesn’t deserve to burn in Hell for eternity. 

From a technical perspective, this is an incredible production. This was also the only Lubitsch film ever made in Technicolor, and he certainly knew how to take advantage of the new technology. I personally don’t like Lubtisch in color; his movies just feel like they were made to be in black and white. Heaven Can Wait is a very gorgeous movie, though. The story takes place over decades, and the production design and wardrobe department do an exceptional job showing the style changes. There’s color pairing with characters throughout the film. The French housekeeper that Henry loses his virginity to is associated with reds, while Martha is always decked out in violets or blues. 

Even the curtains in her bedroom follow this color scheme. When she dies, it is marked by the absence of those violet curtains from the windows, a visual reminder of the loss. Speaking of that, this is a remarkably sad comedy, which surprised me. Beyond the rocky marriage at the heart of the film, there is a reflection on how life is a succession of deaths. Characters present at the start of Henry’s life are gone by the end. It’s just how life goes. The people who shaped you the most when you were a child will be gone by the time you reach the end of your life. They won’t be there to guide you through that stage of existence. While it’s not my favorite of Lubitsch’s works, it is hard to argue that it’s a bad movie; it certainly is not.