“Here Comes Mr. Jordan” (1941), the October entry in the “Angels in Film” series at the Mississippi Museum of Art, co-sponsored by the Crossroads Film Society, is a story of angelic intervention, so you might assume the hero’s life has gotten screwed up somehow, and he needs a supernatural rescue. Au contraire: The hero, Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery), a top prize fighter and a peach of a fellow, is riding high until the angels start jerking him around.
First, Joe gets killed in a plane crash, only because the nervous angel on the New Jersey beat (Edward Everett Horton) yanks his soul from his body before he can save himself. Then, with the “help” of suave senior angel Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), Joe gets installed in the body of young New York millionaire Bruce Farnsworth, which seems like a good deal, except that Farnsworth has just been murdered. And that’s not the worst of his problems.
This movie, remade in 1978 as “Heaven Can Wait,” features several intriguing scenes of chance encounters, climaxing in Joe’s disguised reunion with the winsome Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes). The way Robert Montgomery approaches this scene and the way the script has framed the relationship, invites us to wonder what human beings really offer each other, in the best case. How much of it is individual, how much of it is common humanity?
Looking back, you see that something vital was missing from Joe’s life, and the angels’ mission was to make him whole. Mr. Jordan’s serene confidence in “what has been ordained,” laughably contradicted almost minute-by-minute through plot twists and scrambling angelic improvisations, is justified spiritually in the end.
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The Mississippi Free Press produced this story through the MFP Solutions Lab, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. This series digs into Mississippi’s systemic issues and sheds light on responses to them in other communities. Beyond just reporting on problems, these stories interrogate their causes and inspect potential solutions.
