Heaven Can Wait
Dir. Ernest Lubitsch, 1943
Starring Don Ameche, Gene Tierney, Charles Coburn, Laird Cregar, Marjorie Main, Spring Byington, Eugene Pallette.
This movie is a one of those delightful, whimsical comedies that Ernest Lubitsch made so well. What a civilised, sophisticated director he was.
The film opens with Don Ameche, recently deceased, presenting himself in what turns out to be an antechamber to Hell, believing that this is where he should be, considering the pleasantly unproductive and politely philanderous life he has led.
Asked by ‘His Excellency’, presumably Satan himself and played with great charm by Laird Cregar, what crimes he has committed, he acknowledges that he can think of none. But he confesses that his whole life has been ‘one long misdemeanour.’
One of the joys of the film is the number of beloved character actors who appear. Charles Coburn, the old codger who lusted after Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Eugene Pallette, who was the brilliantly transatlantic Friar Tuck to Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood; and two of my favourite Hollywood old bats.
Forgive my less than gallant description of those actresses who because of shape, plainness or age were condemned to supporting their more glamorous sisters, in this case none less than Gene Tierney, and as often or not stole the show from them.
Heaven Can Wait features Spring Byington, so often the rich middle-aged matron trained only for gossip, prurience and fits of the vapours. In Jezebel she has a cliché to twitter for every occasion.
Spring’s ‘long-term companion’, Marjorie Main, by contrast, is from the ‘tough old boot’ school. She played pioneer women like ‘Ma Kettle’ or slum mothers such as her role as Humphrey Bogart’s in Dead End. Contrary to her screen image, in real life she usually wore white gloves to protect her from germs and often interrupted filming to communicate with her dead husband.
I first came across Marjorie in The Women, the 1939 romantic comedy in which all 160 roles were played by women. I’m told that even the animals featured were female. (Of course, the subject is men, the theme is men, the dialogue concerns men, and it was directed by a man, sort of, George Cukor. But there we go). In the opening credits the leading actresses are represented by animals and if I remember rightly Marjorie’s name appeared over a shot of a cow. So either she was a good sport or had a very bad agent.
In Heaven Can Wait Marjorie is once again involved with cows, being the wife of Eugene Pallette’s beef baron. Cue lots of marital bickering and Eastern jokes about Kansas.
That leads me on to Missouri-born Jane Darwell, who had a Spring Byington type role in Gone With the Wind but whom I recall mainly as a John Ford stalwart, playing eccentric wives, Mormons, randy spinsters, etc. But her great moment was as Ma Joad in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, for which she won a well-deserved supporting actress Oscar. To be honest it feels more like a leading role to me.
My favourite moment from the film is a dialogue-free scene where Ma is burning bits and pieces that she cannot take on the long journey to from Oklahoma to California. Little nick-nacks, sentimental junk, a postcard from St Louis, and a pair of ear-rings she holds up to her fat, old face, remembering her youth and happier times. It’s very moving and the addition of Red River Valley on the soundtrack makes it heart-breaking.
There are only so many roles like that and Jane subsided back into small roles and TV westerns. Her last film role was as the Birdwoman in Mary Poppins. I see that she once played the ‘first witch’ in a TV version of Macbeth. Difficult to imagine such a friendly witch.
The greatest witch of all time is Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. ‘I’ll get you, my pretty, . . . .and your little dog too.’ Her character was voted fourth in an AFI poll of the greatest movie villains, after Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates and Darth Vader.
Margaret never amounted to much after that.
Agnes Moorehead ended up as a witch too, Endora, in the TV series Bewitched. Playing Elizabeth Montgomery’s mother, who actually likes being a witch, unlike her would-be reformed daughter. She really is the mother-in-law from hell. The series gives more than a nod, by the way, to another Lubitsch film, I Married a Witch.
Her dark, harsh features suited shrewish roles and precluded her from leading roles, although in Dark Passage, with Bogart and Bacall, she is supposed to some sort of allure. I remember her as a miserable old woman in Pollyanna, who is reformed by the little brat’s infuriating cheerfulness, instead of strangling her.
She first appeared courtesy of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane and received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Aunt Fanny in Welles’ next film, The Magnificent Ambersons. Lonely, frustrated, mocked, starved of love and denied opportunity to show it, Fanny is memorable and tragic. Agnes gives us a truly brilliant and moving portrayal in a lovely, rather overlooked film. Now I’ve reminded myself of it, I shall go and watch it.
But not before paying tribute to my personal favourite, Margaret Wycherley (pictured), who I am surprised to discover was born British. She appears in Hawks’ Sergeant York, as Gary Cooper’s mother, poor, hard-working and devoutly praying for her wayward son. But there’s no sentimentality in White Heat. Her Ma Jarrat to James Cagney’s Cody is a she-wolf of a woman, cunning and shrewd, suspicious eyes peering out from a lean, pinched face. Cody is merely mad, but Ma embodies evil and perverted maternal love.
There are dozens more, of course, in the gallery of middle-aged actresses who add so much to the texture of great films with little recognition. And no time for the matrons that Hitchcock loved to terrorise.
Starring Don Ameche, Gene Tierney, Charles Coburn, Laird Cregar, Marjorie Main, Spring Byington, Eugene Pallette.
This movie is a one of those delightful, whimsical comedies that Ernest Lubitsch made so well. What a civilised, sophisticated director he was.
The film opens with Don Ameche, recently deceased, presenting himself in what turns out to be an antechamber to Hell, believing that this is where he should be, considering the pleasantly unproductive and politely philanderous life he has led.
Asked by ‘His Excellency’, presumably Satan himself and played with great charm by Laird Cregar, what crimes he has committed, he acknowledges that he can think of none. But he confesses that his whole life has been ‘one long misdemeanour.’
One of the joys of the film is the number of beloved character actors who appear. Charles Coburn, the old codger who lusted after Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Eugene Pallette, who was the brilliantly transatlantic Friar Tuck to Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood; and two of my favourite Hollywood old bats.
Forgive my less than gallant description of those actresses who because of shape, plainness or age were condemned to supporting their more glamorous sisters, in this case none less than Gene Tierney, and as often or not stole the show from them.
Heaven Can Wait features Spring Byington, so often the rich middle-aged matron trained only for gossip, prurience and fits of the vapours. In Jezebel she has a cliché to twitter for every occasion.
Spring’s ‘long-term companion’, Marjorie Main, by contrast, is from the ‘tough old boot’ school. She played pioneer women like ‘Ma Kettle’ or slum mothers such as her role as Humphrey Bogart’s in Dead End. Contrary to her screen image, in real life she usually wore white gloves to protect her from germs and often interrupted filming to communicate with her dead husband.
I first came across Marjorie in The Women, the 1939 romantic comedy in which all 160 roles were played by women. I’m told that even the animals featured were female. (Of course, the subject is men, the theme is men, the dialogue concerns men, and it was directed by a man, sort of, George Cukor. But there we go). In the opening credits the leading actresses are represented by animals and if I remember rightly Marjorie’s name appeared over a shot of a cow. So either she was a good sport or had a very bad agent.
In Heaven Can Wait Marjorie is once again involved with cows, being the wife of Eugene Pallette’s beef baron. Cue lots of marital bickering and Eastern jokes about Kansas.
That leads me on to Missouri-born Jane Darwell, who had a Spring Byington type role in Gone With the Wind but whom I recall mainly as a John Ford stalwart, playing eccentric wives, Mormons, randy spinsters, etc. But her great moment was as Ma Joad in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, for which she won a well-deserved supporting actress Oscar. To be honest it feels more like a leading role to me.
My favourite moment from the film is a dialogue-free scene where Ma is burning bits and pieces that she cannot take on the long journey to from Oklahoma to California. Little nick-nacks, sentimental junk, a postcard from St Louis, and a pair of ear-rings she holds up to her fat, old face, remembering her youth and happier times. It’s very moving and the addition of Red River Valley on the soundtrack makes it heart-breaking.
There are only so many roles like that and Jane subsided back into small roles and TV westerns. Her last film role was as the Birdwoman in Mary Poppins. I see that she once played the ‘first witch’ in a TV version of Macbeth. Difficult to imagine such a friendly witch.
The greatest witch of all time is Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. ‘I’ll get you, my pretty, . . . .and your little dog too.’ Her character was voted fourth in an AFI poll of the greatest movie villains, after Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates and Darth Vader.
Margaret never amounted to much after that.
Agnes Moorehead ended up as a witch too, Endora, in the TV series Bewitched. Playing Elizabeth Montgomery’s mother, who actually likes being a witch, unlike her would-be reformed daughter. She really is the mother-in-law from hell. The series gives more than a nod, by the way, to another Lubitsch film, I Married a Witch.
Her dark, harsh features suited shrewish roles and precluded her from leading roles, although in Dark Passage, with Bogart and Bacall, she is supposed to some sort of allure. I remember her as a miserable old woman in Pollyanna, who is reformed by the little brat’s infuriating cheerfulness, instead of strangling her.
She first appeared courtesy of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane and received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Aunt Fanny in Welles’ next film, The Magnificent Ambersons. Lonely, frustrated, mocked, starved of love and denied opportunity to show it, Fanny is memorable and tragic. Agnes gives us a truly brilliant and moving portrayal in a lovely, rather overlooked film. Now I’ve reminded myself of it, I shall go and watch it.
But not before paying tribute to my personal favourite, Margaret Wycherley (pictured), who I am surprised to discover was born British. She appears in Hawks’ Sergeant York, as Gary Cooper’s mother, poor, hard-working and devoutly praying for her wayward son. But there’s no sentimentality in White Heat. Her Ma Jarrat to James Cagney’s Cody is a she-wolf of a woman, cunning and shrewd, suspicious eyes peering out from a lean, pinched face. Cody is merely mad, but Ma embodies evil and perverted maternal love.
There are dozens more, of course, in the gallery of middle-aged actresses who add so much to the texture of great films with little recognition. And no time for the matrons that Hitchcock loved to terrorise.
If, like me, you think it 's the supporting actors that give class to movies, here's a site you might want to visit:
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