Alexander Hall | Here Comes Mr. Jordan / 1941

the corpse hunters

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller (screenplay, based on the stage play by Harry Segall), Alexander Hall (director) Here Comes Mr. Jordan / 1941

 

Alexander Hall’s 1941 film, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, begins with one of the oddest plot contrivances of all time: the film’s hero, boxer Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) dies in the crash of a small plane he is flying. Told he is dead by angelic Messenger 7013 (Edward Everett Horton), Joe refuses to believe him, particularly since he still has his lucky saxophone in hand, demanding to be taken to the man in charge, which happens to be Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), an oddly dressed manager of the removal area of souls to heaven, a space that appears to be a normal 1940s airliner.

     When Joe refuses to board, Jordan checks things out, only to discover that the Messenger has intruded, removing Joe’s soul before his actual death, discovering that in the book of fate Joe is evidently scheduled to live 50 years further into time. What to do?

     Return him to his body, of course, and put him back into it. Not so quick! When the small hunting party returns to the site of the crash they find that the body has already been removed and, soon after, we discover, cremated by Joe’s boxing manager, “Pop” Corkle (James Gleason). How Corkle has already discovered the news of Joe’s accident and whisked his body away so quickly is never explained. But that somewhat absurd plot wrinkle requires that Joe, the Messenger, and Jordan immediately go on the search for a new body that might fit Joe’s soul.

     There is not only something fairly ghoulish about their search, but in seeking a male body out in such good shape as Joe has kept his—Joe refuses hundreds of corpses as not being appropriate to his body type—the trio is also performing, whether you want to admit it or not, a kind game of speed gay-dating in the manner of Rock Hudson’s later cinematic attempt in Send Me No Flowers (1964), when he struggles to find the perfect man to become his wife’s husband after his imminent death. No one is quite good enough to fit the man of Joe’s dreams, in this case himself. This is a lost Narcissus in search of his own face.

      They finally show up at the doorstep of the wealthy, crooked banker and investor, Bruce Farnsworth, about to be drowned in his bathtub by his wife Julia (Rita Johnson) and Farnsworth’s secretary Tony Abbott (John Emery), an evil couple about to kill off their husband and employer in order to reward them one another in marriage and to receive his substantial wealth.

      These supposedly heavenly messengers slip Joe into his body, startling the two would-be murderers and saving the day for Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes) who now shows up to demand that Farnsworth return the money he has swindled from her innocent father.

      By this time the plot is so luridly whacky that the fantastical tale has surely caught our attention if nothing else. In Hall’s version, even if the murderers are astonished, they fade, nonetheless, in the background (unlike, the increasingly delicious terrors experienced by the duo, Charles Grodin and Dyan Cannon, in Warren Beatty’s and Buck Henry’s 1978 remake Heaven Can Wait) as Joe, now Farnsworth quickly moves forward, behind the scenes righting all the evils Farnsworth has committed and attending carefully to his new physique. The latter requires him to bring back his trainer and the necessity of proving to him who he “really” is by blowing a few sour notes upon his sex, an instrument he loves but cannot really properly play.

     As I mention above, in the remake the giddy acting of the guilty couple and their over-the-top hysterics, help to detract from the body-hunting plot. But in Hall’s version we hardly get a change to blink before Joe is told he’s going to have to change bodies again since the wife and secretary are about to make another go-round in Farnsworth’s murder, which, after all, Jordan reminds us, was destined in the first place!

     Joe just has time to look into Bette Logan’s eyes and warn her that she should remember his deep gaze just in case she might later run into a boxer who doesn’t look like he does now.

     Off he flies to be refitted into another new corpse, that of his boxer friend, Murdock, who has just been shot in the middle of a match by crooked gamblers who had demanded he throw the fight. All I can say, is that it’s always nicer to get inside the body of a good friend instead of some distant stranger.

     Evidently, Murdock’s death, quite inexplicably, was not destined; for Joe, now in Murdock’s body, slowly rises and wins the match, firing Murdock’s equally crooked trainer, and taking on, once more, McCorkle, who having spotted Joe’s golden saxophone at ringside, has already hurried off to the site of the match. McCorkle and Joe are the real married couple in this movie, much like Hudson and his neighbor played by Tony Randall in Send Me No Flowers.

    This time, Joe’s memory is wiped clean by the inconsistent Mr. Jordan, and, accordingly, he doesn’t recognize Bette Logan, who also mysteriously shows up in the dark halls of the boxing locker rooms. But it doesn’t matter, since both Joe, now Murdock, and Bette seem to recognize something in each other’s eyes (surely a brief memory that they’re supposed to be acting in a heterosexual comedy) and toss out the necessary banal metaphors of surrounding the notion of vaguely remembering having seen someone before—no we have not yet entered the sublime halls of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad—deciding to discuss it over dinner. At least Joe has a boxer’s body which he can now inhabit for the next 49 years or so! And will probably have dozens of kids with Bette. Jordan sends him away with the salutatory, “Goodbye, Champ!” No voyage to the next French garrison for them!

      Montgomery suffers the trials and tribulations of reincarnation with bland impatience, whole the producer’s original choice for the lead actor, Cary Grant, might have played it with a far better and more appropriate series of flummoxed comic gestures; and surely we might have found the shifting of bodies, given Grant’s graceful exterior, a far great curse. Certainly the selection of bodies might have played out quite differently in the hands of a gay man.

      But in the end, none of this truly matters since everything has been put into Rains’, Hortons’, and Gleasons’ affable and capable hands. Given Rains’ suave elocutions and friendly, if slightly ironic smiles, Horton’s blundering comic confusions, and Gleason’s grumpy loyalty to his friend, we know that no matter where this corpse-robbing voyage will take us, we’ll have some fun along the way before being brought safely home into normative heterosexual reality.

     Yet given the abuse of all those dead bodies along the way, we might want to reconsider joining the Neptune Society (which assures its members of prepaid cremations) to be sure our bodies are not used, as Mr. Jordan describes them, simply as “outer cloaks”—unless you really do want to get into another friend’s skin. But then, beware of Dr. Frankenstein.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2015; revised April 6, 2026

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015) and My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).