Heaven Can Wait (1978)

The Worst Film Ever

The greatest movie ever made..!

Amateur movie with Big budget

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

A Los Angeles Rams quarterback, accidentally taken away from his body by an overanxious angel before he was meant to die, returns to life in the body of a recently murdered millionaire. The insane plot and the good and talent cast can't make Heaven Can Wait work since it's jokes and it's characters are more than boring and bland and the whole package fails to work in the end. (0/10)

A remake of 'Here comes Mr Jordan', 'Heaven can wait' is a absolutely wonderful 1970's fantasy/comedy with a cast that really makes the movie. Warren Beatty in one of his best roles, is Joe Pendleton, a pro quarterback who unexpectedly dies while training for his football comeback. When he reaches the afterlife, he learns that there was a mistake and that he was taken too early. Unable to return to his old body, after it is cremated, a suitable replacement must be found. Entering the body of a wealthy industrialist murdered by his valet, Neil Farnsworth, Pendleton must decide what is really important to him, returning to football glory, or staying as Farnsworth to help a beautiful woman who comes to Farnsworth for help. The film is a treat. Beautifully shot, with soft lighting, and wonderfully acted by a GREAT cast including James Mason as the angel Mr Jordan, Charles Grodin as the murderous valet, Jack Warden, Dolph Sweet, Dyan Cannon, and the beautiful Julie Christie as Beatty's love interest. A filmed really tinged with sadness in its own way, but a beautiful love story, it should not be missed. Highly recommended.

Remake of Robert Montgomery classic "Here Comes Mister Jordan" (Mister Jordan was played by Claude Rains). Here, James Mason is just as good as Rains, if a trifle too smooth. Buck Henry's officious escort, however, is no comparison to Edward Everett Horton, who played the same part with much more vim in the original. Perhaps Henry or Beatty wanted a distinctly different type, but Henry does not come off well.The main story-line goes, in case you don't know: Warren Beatty plays a football player who, at a late age (Beatty was actually 40) finally earns his dream start for the LA Rams football team. Unfortunately a heavenly escort (Buck Henry) removes the football player's soul from his body just before an accident (which he was supposed to survive without injury). So much for free will. In this movie, it's all laid out for us, folks.Beatty's football player is owed a body, after his own is cremated. Mister Jordan, apparently head of this heavenly branch office, shows him several bodies from athletic types on the point of death, but Beatty's character finds fault with all of them.Finally, Mister Jordan brings him to a body on the point of death who is not, technically, an athlete, though he must have a good physique. He's a rich guy whose wife and private secretary are trying to bump him off. Beatty is about to refuse when he suddenly gets the hots for a character played by Julie Christie. So long as the arrangement is temporary, Beatty's character goes along with the gig until a better body can be found.James Mason is excellent, Buck Henry is annoying, Warren Beatty never for an instant makes you believe he's anything but Warren Beatty. Beatty has found his métier with this movie. Always more a movie star than an actor, Beatty did light stuff better than heavy stuff, sort of like a pre-Bond Roger Moore -- though Moore's enunciation was a lot better. Rumor has it Beatty wanted non-actor Muhammed Ali for the part. If that is true, we're probably better off. And the change from a boxer to a football player was good. Who watches boxing anymore? For the rest of the cast, Dyan Cannon is gorgeous, Charles Grodin is weaselly (what else can we want from them?) John Gielgud, who does not appear in this film, is supposed to have said of Ingrid Bergman, who does not appear in this movie, "She speaks five languages and can't act in any of them." One might make a similarly catty remark of Warren Beatty's ex-flame Julie Christie.In "Doctor Zhivago" a decade and a half earlier, Christie merely had to look good on camera while letting Freddie Young's camera-work and Maurice Jarre's music do the heavy lifting. In this movie, Christie's frizzy hairdo can't save her. Apparently Kate Jackson turned down the Christie part. If this is true, it shows that she (or, to be fair, perhaps her agent) had absolutely no head for how to keep her career going after the "Charlie's Angels" jump-start. Too bad. I think Jackson might have been good.The only down side to this movie is the heavily-labored sub-plot. Liberals don't know how to have fun. There always has to be a "message" and the message always has to promulgate liberal dogma. To add to Christie's insanely miserable hair, her character is a rabid environmentalist with some cock-and-bull story of the rich guy destroying something or messing something up with one of his subsidiaries. So, in order to boost unemployment, she is determined to shut him down and be the planet's savior. Hoo-ray.Beatty, brother of the notorious left-wing nut job Shirley MacLaine, co-wrote the screenplay with former comedienne Elaine May; and he apparently couldn't just let it be a cheery little comedy about a dead guy trying to get a rich wastrel's body in shape for the big game after falling for a hottie. No matter how extreme an environmentalist one is (never trust anything ending in -ist), why not just have a sense of fun with a movie once in a while, and let the planet go to Hell for one hundred minutes? Of course, Beatty's next film, "Reds," glorified the founding of one of the most murderous tyrannies in modern human history (hey, kids, lets put on a show glorifying the burning of the Reichstag!) Even considering the very existence of Christie and her character, it's a fun move. And that is all it is. It's no great classic -- but then, neither was the original. Beatty did his take thirty-seven years after the original. It's time for a twenty-first century incarnation.

I found "Heaven Can Wait" to have some interesting turns, but it generally falls apart in the third act, most especially the too-muddled scene where Farnsworth's story is closed out and Tom's story gets rolling. Also, the foreshadowing of Farnsworth's last meeting with Betty is *much* too overdone.As a longtime fan of "Quantum Leap" who has only recently seen "Heaven Can Wait" for the first time, I was surprised to see how well this film fits into the mythos of that show.It is very easy to imagine Joe as a Leaper, right down to looking and sounding like Joe both to himself and to us, having friends he can talk to that others can't see or hear, and leaping from one body to another to set things right. It's easy to see the ending with Tom as answering the age-old question from the show of "What would've happened if Sam hadn't leaped when the job was done?" The only thing missing, really, is the time travel aspect.