HEAVEN CAN WAIT (1943)
Directed & Produced by: Ernst Lubitsch.
Written by: Samson Raphaelson, based on the play Birthday by Lazlo Bus-Fekete.
Director of Photography: Edward Cronjager.
Edited by: Dorothy Spencer.
Music by: Alfred Newman.
Released by: Criterion.
Country of Origin: USA. 112 min. Not Rated.
With: Don Ameche, Gene Tierney, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Laird Cregar, Spring Byington, Allyn Joslyn, Eugene Pallette, Signe Hasso & Louis Calhern.
DVD Features: Video conversation between film critics Molly Haskell & Andrew Sarris. "Creativity with Bill Moyers: A Portrait of Samson Raphaelson" (1982), a 30-minute program exploring the screenwriter's life & career. Audio seminar with Raphaelson & film critic Richard Corliss recorded at the Museum of Modern Art in 1977. Lubitsch home piano recordings. Trailer. A new essay by film scholar William Paul. Restored high-definition digital transfer.

This 1943 production from director Ernst Lubitsch's long partnership with playwright Samson Raphaelson has accrued fame for being one of the pair's most enduring collaborations, even though the "Lubitsch touch" is more subdued here than in the pair's Trouble in Paradise and Shop Around the Corner, and barely recognizable from the director's silent works. From the opening scene, where Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche) arrives in Satan's executive suite in Hell, this is a decidedly restrained picture for the duo. Besides providing film history with one of its most memorable interpretations of Hell, the scene sets the bar for the movie: witty dialogue is exchanged for witty circumstances; the overt Lubitsch opulence, for discrete indicators of social class; biting sexual humor is given over to a decidedly chaste rendering of pleasure; and homespun Americana, instead of Continental sophistication.

Even the movie's structure is more drawn out and nuanced than the partners' previous pictures. Assuming his wandering eye and lies has warranted eternal suffering, Henry insists to a confused and comically conversational Lucifer he deserves a spot in Hell. He relays his life's story and all its damning events, which provides a fairly original narrative framework. Of course, in each segment he, instead, displays a good-natured and earnest quality that shows why he belongs in Heaven, providing Lubitsch and Raphaelson with a platform to discuss sexuality and morality in subtle and subversive detail.

DVD Extras: The special features are rather meek in number and focus largely on Raphaelson. The more interesting of these Raphaelson featurettes is the seminar with Corliss where he declaims his preference for playwriting and regrets he is immortalized by films he reviles (The Jazz Singer [1927], for one) rather than the plays in which his pride is clearly situated.

The PBS documentary's best moments are Raphaelson teaching his class at Columbia University, allowing us to see his thorough understanding of his craft while advising students on writing and directing. His discussion of his relationship with Lubitsch is given noteworthy depth, culminating in the screenwriter saying, “He wrote some of my best lines, and I contributed more than a few of those ‘silent things’ that are considered Lubitsch touches.”

All in all, the Criterion release is a graceful and long-awaited DVD debut. However, for more detailed extras on Lubitsch (including a film short from his silent years, a roundtable radio conversation between Lubitsch and contemporaneous directors, and a multitude of critical discussions), the Criterion edition of Trouble in Paradise is an able sibling to this release. Zachary Jones
August 22, 2005