Heaven Can Wait (Warren Beatty)

(Amazon UK link)

We first watched the film ‘Heaven can wait’ in 2007, and recalled finding it mildly amusing. We had entirely forgotten the storyline, other than knowing it was about someone who was due to go to Heaven…

A rather young-looking Warren Beatty stars as Joe Pendleton. He is a talented sportsman, who is an important team member in his local American football team. He keeps fit, eats well, and plays the saxophone for fun. His trainer Max (Jack Warden) sees a great future ahead of him.

Then, when Joe is out cycling, he is involved in a horrific road accident. We don’t see any details, just hear something in a tunnel; the next moment he is walking in some clouds. He is supposed to board an aeroplane at the end of a queue, and is being told what to do by a rather nervous - and officious - man who says he is Joe’s ‘escort’ to the afterlife.

But Joe does not want to go. He is convinced he is dreaming. So his case is referred upwards to the more experienced Mr Jordan (James Mason). It turns out that an error has been made, and - after much discussion and negotiation - Joe is allowed to continue living, in the body of someone else. He appears to everyone else as a ruthless millionaire tycoon, whose wife and secretary have plotted to murder him.

There’s an inevitable love interest in the British environmental campaigner Betty Logan (a rather young Julie Christie). Joe also reverses some of the decisions he supposedly made in the past. He confuses his household staff by becoming politer, by changing his habits, and - eventually - by buying up an entire American Football team, as he is determined to play despite his different body…

It’s light-hearted, and we would probably have appreciated it more if we had any understanding of how American Football works. There are several scenes revolving around this game, but we had not the faintest idea what was going on, or what the relevance was. Still, we got the general idea. It’s quite a clever idea having someone inhabit the body (but not the mind) of someone else, and there are some mildly amusing scenes when Joe is apparently out of character, or when his staff see him apparently talking to himself, when he is conversing with Mr Jordan (invisible to everyone else).

We had entirely forgotten that it’s not a modern film. Betty Logan speaks in the kind of BBC English that used to be inherent in films from the 1940s and 1950s, and the style in general feels old-fashioned, at least fifty or sixty years out of date (as it’s in colour we assumed it couldn’t be much older than 1960). That’s not to say that it’s a bad thing - there were some excellent films made in that era.

So we were a tad surprised to find, after we had finished watching, that it was made as recently as 1978 - and then shocked to realise that’s still forty years ago!  Warren Beatty must have been forty years old, but managed to pass easily for an athlete in his twenties.

The pace is quite good, once we accepted the decidedly dated style of the film. Other than the American Football scenes, we quite enjoyed it. The rating is given as A in the UK; apparently this is a precursor to the modern PG. There’s some mild bad language, some bedroom scenes (although fully clothed and with nothing other than a cuddle happening), and some deaths, though they all happen off stage. I cannot imagine that anyone under the age of about thirteen would be at all interested in this anyway.

It made a good evening’s viewing, though I wouldn’t recommend it particularly highly. But perhaps we’ll watch it again in another twelve years. It's worth watching if you want something reasonably light, but a bit different, and may be more fun if you understand American football.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's DVD Reviews