This movie was nominated for several Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor (Warren Beatty), Best Supporting Actor (Jack Warden), Best Supporting Actress (Dyan Cannon), Best Director (Warren Beatty & Buck Henry), Best Writing based on material from another medium (Elain May & Warren Beatty), Best Cinematography (William Fraker) and Best Original Score (Dave Grusin). Bottom line, Warren Beatty was involved with writing, directing, and acting in this very entertaining movie.
This was a very good movie, should not to be confused with the 20th Century Fox movie, Heaven Can Wait (1943). The only similarity between these two movies, is that a man was called to a waiting station after dying. From there on, the stories are totally different.
Without going into a complete recapping of the movie, the Beatty character seems to have been assumed to be dead in a bicycling accident when an over reactionary "angel" (Buck Henry) took his soul to a waiting station before he was really dead. Once done, it could not be undone and the Warren Beatty character had to take another man's body.
It is at this point that the great comedy really starts to take hold, with Dyan Cannon and Charles Grodin knowing that they had killed the man to which Beatty's body is assigned. This is a great movie with a lot of comical overtones----but then so was Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), the original movie from which this one was remade.
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Now that Beatty has retired and I can look back over his movies, I have come to realize his really unique comedic talent: The characters he often did the best were actually fools who took themselves very seriously. Or, at least that is the way that I see him playing real characters like Jack Reed, Bugsy Siegel, and Clyde Barrow as well as fictitious character such as John McCab, George (in Shampoo) and Jay Billington Bulworth (in Bulworth). Note--This personal observation does not take into account those characters that he played who did not appear to be clownish fools, i,e, Bud in Splendor in the Grass.
This was a very good movie, should not to be confused with the 20th Century Fox movie, Heaven Can Wait (1943). The only similarity between these two movies, is that a man was called to a waiting station after dying. From there on, the stories are totally different.
Without going into a complete recapping of the movie, the Beatty character seems to have been assumed to be dead in a bicycling accident when an over reactionary "angel" (Buck Henry) took his soul to a waiting station before he was really dead. Once done, it could not be undone and the Warren Beatty character had to take another man's body.
It is at this point that the great comedy really starts to take hold, with Dyan Cannon and Charles Grodin knowing that they had killed the man to which Beatty's body is assigned. This is a great movie with a lot of comical overtones----but then so was Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), the original movie from which this one was remade.
.................................
Now that Beatty has retired and I can look back over his movies, I have come to realize his really unique comedic talent: The characters he often did the best were actually fools who took themselves very seriously. Or, at least that is the way that I see him playing real characters like Jack Reed, Bugsy Siegel, and Clyde Barrow as well as fictitious character such as John McCab, George (in Shampoo) and Jay Billington Bulworth (in Bulworth). Note--This personal observation does not take into account those characters that he played who did not appear to be clownish fools, i,e, Bud in Splendor in the Grass.