Here Comes Mr. Jordan
Short description
Joe Pendleton is a boxer on his way to a championship fight when his plane goes down. His death, however, comes too soon: a heavenly messenger new to the job has pulled his spirit from his body ahead of schedule. By the time the error is noticed, Joe's own body is gone, so Mr. Jordan, the messenger's superior, arranges for him to occupy another one. That body belongs to Bruce Farnsworth, a wealthy man who has just been murdered by his wife. Joe sets about living Farnsworth's life honestly, but the arrangement grows complicated when he falls for a young woman, and the murdered man's wife remains in the picture.
Alexander Hall directed this 1941 Columbia Pictures production, working from a screenplay by Seton I. Miller and Sidney Buchman, with Everett Riskin producing. Robert Montgomery plays Joe, Claude Rains plays Mr. Jordan, Evelyn Keyes plays Bette Logan, and Rita Johnson and Edward Everett Horton appear as Julia Farnsworth and the messenger. It followed Hall's Limehouse Blues by several years. The film runs 94 minutes, and among a credited cast of 52 it mixes comedy, fantasy and romance.
On IMDb it holds a 7.5 rating from around 8,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7 from a much smaller base of 125 votes. A critics' rating of 7.5 from 21 reviews places it in line with the wider audience response rather than setting it apart.
What's left behind the scenes
- James Gleason (1882-1959) was brought onto the film's creative team primarily to help refine the dialogue. Gleason had a gift for using colloquialisms, and he also proved to be an excellent actor.
- Harry Cohn (1891-1958), the founder and president of Columbia Pictures, had certain doubts about this adaptation of the little-known play by Harry Segal (1892-1975). He preferred to allocate substantial budgets only to the production of films in whose future box office success he was one hundred percent confident—for example, films featuring Rita Hayworth (1918-1987). However, screenwriter Sidney Buchman (1902-1975) somehow managed to convince Cohn to allocate money for the expensive sets of the afterlife and the luxurious Farnsworth mansion, and also to borrow Robert Montgomery (1904-1981) from MGM. On top of that, Buchman managed to convince Cohn that he knew what audiences would go to the cinema to see better than the Wall Street bankers to whom Cohn reported.
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