Saturday Night Cinema: Heaven Can Wait


Tonight’s wonderful Saturday Night Cinema feature is the delightful comedy, Heaven Can Wait.

THE SCREEN; ‘ Heaven Can Wait,’ an Amusing Comedy of Manners, With Don Ameche, Gene Tierey and Charles Coburn, Opens at Roxy
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: August 12, 1943

It is an amusing anomaly that Twentieth Century-Fox displays a particular fondness for the nineteenth century and wolves. Never is the studio quite so profligate as when it has a film in which the background is fin-de-siècle and the hero is a lady-killing blade. The settings then ooze a horse-hair flavor and Technicolor rainbows the screen. And the hero has a patent-leather polish that would have dazzled Delmonico’s.

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No wonder, then, that the studio has been chortling with so much advance glee over its latest package of entertainment, “Heaven Can Wait,” which came to the Roxy yesterday. For here is a shined and scented chromo which Ernst Lubitsch has produced for it with all the ornamental excess of the period so dear to the heart of the studio. Here is a nostalgic nosegay in which the hero is quite a wolf, indeed. And here is a comedy of manners, edged with satire, in the slickest Lubitsch style. The Twentieth Century-Fox has got a picture about fin-de-siècle conduct which rings a bell.

For this time Mr. Lubitsch (and his playwright, Sam Raphaelson) is not concerned with the present, as he was so embarrasingly in “To Be or Not To Be,” but is poking very sly and sentimental fun at Eighteen Nineties naughtiness. He—and Mr. Raphaelson, who based the script on a Lazlo Bus-Fekete play—are laughing with gentle affection at the pruderies of yesterday. Their picture has utterly no significance. Indeed, it has very little point, except to afford entertainment. And that it does quite well.

It begins with an elderly gentleman, obviously departed from this life, applying for permanent admission at the place to which so many have said he would go. Modestly he confesses that he wouldn’t even apply up above. But His Excellency, who passes on the sinners, is a little bit doubtful of this case, so he sternly demands credentials, and the gentleman gives them—for high two hours—while Heaven waits:

He tells—or rather, does the picture—of his earliest experiences with girls, when he discovered, to his lasting confusion, that, to win them, you must have plenty of coin. And then he recounts his young manhood as the scion of wealthy New York aristocrats and of his frivolous ways with the ladies, which shocked his parents and pleased his stiff granddad, concluding that phase by eloping with the fiancée of his strait-laced cousin.

The second—and less amusing—half of the picture continues the married life of this wayward gent, his silly estrangement from his darling and their reunion, with grandpa to egg them on. And it fritters out in old-age sentiment which is punctured by one sharp Lubitsch “touch.” Mr. Lubitsch fortunately manages to top it off with an innocent, genial leer.

The character of the rakish hero is never clearly defined, nor is that of the girl who marries him. He remains an ambiguous changeling, and so does she. That may be one reason why Don Ameche and Gene Tierney are flat in the roles. Or rather, they lack the flexibility which such mannered comedy demands.

But so many other characters are so amusingly written and played that the lack is not overpowering. Charles Coburn as grandpa is great—a curmudgeon full of venom and gleeful naughtiness. Marjorie Main and Eugene Pallette play a pair of Kansas inlaws screamingly, and through them Mr. Lubitsch and Mr. Raphaelson satirize wealth in a lusty vein. Mention should be made of Allyn Joslyn’s goody-goody prig and of Louis Calhern’s Father and of several in lesser roles.

But those you will personally discover, for the film is certainly one you’ll want to see. It loses tempo occasionally. It drags a bit toward the end. But—Heaven’s above!

HEAVEN CAN WAIT, screen play by Samson Raphaelson; based on the play “Birthday” by Lazlo Bus-Fekete; produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch for Twentieth Century-Fox. At the Roxy.
Martha . . . . . Gene Tierney
Henry Van Cleve . . . . . Don Ameche
Hugo Van Cleve . . . . . Charles Coburn
Mrs. Strabel . . . . . Marjorie Main
His Excellency . . . . . Laird Cregar
Bertha Van Cleve . . . . . Spring Byington
Albert Van Cleve . . . . . Allyn Joslyn
E. F. Strabel . . . . . Eugene Pallette
Mademoiselle . . . . . Signe Hasso
Randolph Van Cleve . . . . . Louis Calhern
Peggy Nash . . . . . Helene Reynolds
James . . . . . Aubrey Mather
Jack Van Cleve . . . . . Michael Ames
Jasper . . . . . Clarence Muse
Henry Van Cleve (age 15) . . . . . Dickie Moore
Albert Van Cleve (age 15) . . . . . Dickie Jones

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