OVP: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

Film: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
Stars: Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes, Claude Rains, Rita Johnson, James Gleason
Director: Alexander Hall
Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Actor-Robert Montgomery, Supporting Actor-James Gleason, Director, Adapted Screenplay*, Motion Picture Story, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We are going to finish our week-long look at the Supporting Actor category with another repeat in years (unlike the two 2003 films, this was completely accidental and had more to do with what movies were leaving Criterion than anything else).  Today's film is also unusual because it's not what you'd expect from a Supporting Actor lineup.  If you just looked at the "Stars" line up top, you would assume that the Supporting Actor nominee that was coming out of Here Comes Mr. Jordan would be Claude Rains.  Rains, after all, was nominated for four Academy Awards throughout his career, and this was in the sweet spot when he was getting those nominations.  However, it is in fact James Gleason who is the nominee in this bunch, getting his sole Oscar nomination.  Unlike Rains, who is a pretty common name amongst Classic Hollywood fans, Gleason isn't a character actor that's easily identifiable today, and one whose work I was super familiar with.  I'd seen him in two of his biggest classics (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Night of the Hunter), but those are small parts and are overshadowed in my memory.  At the time, Gleason was famous in the way TV stars of the coming decades would be for his roles in the Hildegarde Withers and Higgins Family movie serials.  Was he a worthy nominee, and why precisely was he chosen over someone more Academy-friendly like Rains?  Let's find out, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) Here Comes Mr. Jordan is a tale you might already know, as it was remade in 1978 with Warren Beatty in the film Heaven Can Wait.  If you don't, here's the gist.  Joe Pendleton (Montgomery) is a world class boxer, someone who is poised to break out into the big time before he dies in a plane crash...or at least we initially think he dies in a plane crash.  It turns out when he gets to heaven that the angel who took him did so too early, as Joe was going to survive the crash, and live another fifty years.  Joe's body, though, has been cremated, and so the angel's superior Mr. Jordan (Rains) has to do something else-he has to find another body of someone who has just died for Joe to take over.  They settle on Bruce Farnsworth, a ruthless businessman who has just been murdered by his wife Julia (Johnson).  He chooses to do so to help Miss Logan (Keyes), a young woman whose father has taken the fall for Farnsworth, and thus will soon have both of their lives ruined.  Once in the body, he falls for Miss Logan and begins to train to become the champ as Farnsworth, eventually winning over with the help of Pop (Gleason), his old boxing trainer, the only person who knows Farnsworth's real identity.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan is clever and really sweet.  It's the sort of movie that I think if you were new to old Hollywood movies or easily jaded you'd mock pretty much from the start, but as I am neither new to this kind of movie nor jaded, I loved it.  Montgomery is not an actor I think of as particularly versatile, but he's well-cast as Joe Pendleton, a lug who has a big heart.  The story is ingenious, and the script is fun, getting in some solid one-liners (particularly from Rains & Gleason), and showing us a tale that could probably be remade a second time today, perhaps with a comic actor like Rebel Wilson or Tiffany Haddish.  The cinematography nomination is unusual (there's very little boxing in this boxing movie, which is usually where this might come from), but not bad (particularly the way that Farnsworth's mansion is lit), and the direction is tidy, if conventional.

The nomination for Gleason makes sense in some regards, though I did leave wondering more so why they didn't go to the more favored Rains.  Both actors have meaty parts-this isn't a case where Rains character is boring, and I preferred his performance to Gleason's in that it's more sophisticated & a-characteristic of the rest of the film.  But Gleason lands his comic bits, and is playing the more traditional role for Oscar; actors ranging from Burgess Meredith to Clint Eastwood to Paul Giamatti have been nominated for playing the tough-talking boxing trainer in the corner, as the sweet science is Oscar's favorite sport.  While this never rises above cliche and two-dimensional, it still works within the confines of the film, is quite amusing, and it's hard to begrudge a longtime character actor getting their moment in the sun.