Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy about a rich, idle, charming man explaining himself to the Devil is the warmest film he made and one of his best. It asks you to forgive a great deal on very little evidence, and mostly you will.
Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche) arrives in Hell well dressed and certain he belongs there. His Excellency (Laird Cregar), a courteous man behind a large desk, is not so sure and asks him to make his case. Henry tells him his life story. That is the whole shape of Heaven Can Wait: seventy-odd years of a New Yorker who never worked a day, chased women, married one, and was mostly at home. It is among the finest things Lubitsch made, and we recommend it to anyone, with one caveat: it wants you to forgive a man who is unusually good at asking.
Samson Raphaelson’s screenplay moves through Henry’s life a birthday at a time, and each stop is a small comedy. There is the governess, Yvette (Signe Hasso), who teaches the boy about women while his parents, Bertha (Spring Byington) and Randolph (Louis Calhern), argue about his upbringing. There is the grandfather, Hugo (Charles Coburn), who approves of everything Henry does because he recognises it. There is the bookshop where Henry meets Martha Strabel (Gene Tierney), pretends to be the shop assistant and learns she is engaged to his cousin Albert (Allyn Joslyn), who has never done anything wrong. Her parents, E.F. Strabel (Eugene Pallette) and Mrs. Strabel (Marjorie Main), are Kansas beef money who conduct their marriage as a feud over the Sunday papers.
Edward Cronjager shoots it in Technicolor, and not the shouting kind. The Van Cleve house is cream walls, dark wood and the deep reds of upholstery; the colour is period furniture rather than spectacle. René Hubert’s costumes do the work of a calendar: bustles give way to shirtwaists and then to the dropped waists of the twenties, and Tierney wears each as though she had chosen it that morning. Dorothy Spencer cuts between decades with no fuss; Lubitsch shows you the new wallpaper in the hall and Spencer moves on before anyone says what year it is. Alfred Newman and Cyril J. Mockridge score it with waltzes that stay in the background, where a film about a man who never raised his voice needs them.
Ameche plays Henry as a man who has never been refused and is faintly puzzled by the idea. He is light and quick and he never asks to be liked, which is why he is. Tierney has the harder part. Martha is given less to do: she is the only person in it who understands exactly what she has married, and Tierney lets you see her decide, more than once, that it is worth it. Coburn walks off with every scene, and Cregar, in a role that could have been one joke, gives the Devil the patience of a good headmaster.
There is a scene between the couple in later life, which we will not describe, in which they simply sit and talk. Nothing happens. Lubitsch does not move the camera and Spencer does not cut, and we were moved more than we expected to be, because the joke and the sadness arrive in the same sentence and neither is allowed to win.
The flaws are real and they are the same flaw twice. Henry’s sins are almost all kept off screen. The film tells us he is a rogue and shows us a man who takes his wife to the theatre. When it does put one on screen, the episode with a showgirl, Peggy Nash (Helene Whitney), the tone wobbles and the film hurries past it. The Hell framing is one idea, and by the third return to the desk it is a way of changing the subject. At 112 minutes the middle stretch, once the household has settled, loses its pace for a reel, and we noticed.
Set against Lubitsch’s own work, it is gentler than Trouble in Paradise and softer than Ninotchka, with none of their appetite for making a fool of somebody. This is a film about being fond of people who do not deserve it, made by a man who plainly was. Watch it with someone you have been married to for a while, and do not expect to agree afterwards on whether Henry got what he deserved.
