Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) could have been a contender if he hadn't been snatched from this mortal coil fifty years too early by an overzealous heavenly hall monitor (Edward Everett Horton), who let him fry in a plane crash which he was to have survived. Heaven's head honcho (Claude Rains) understand's Joe's plight, however, and agrees to send him back to earth to fight for the heavyweight championship. His body having been cremated, he is offered that of a freshly murdered playboy-tycoon. When he returns to his former planet in this new guise, it's rough going both with his old manager (James Gleason) and his new, accidentally acquired circle of enemies, including the tycoon's wife and her lover. Critic Andrew Sarris writes: “For my money, one of the most poignant moments in the history of the cinema comes when James Gleason, cradling Joe's saxaphone in his arms, looks up into Montgomery's eyes to find the man he once knew, and then slowly faces the fact that that man is dead and gone forever, and a new man has taken his place. Gleason's look of bemused resignation belongs in the Louvre.” Warren Beatty's 1978 remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan took the name of the play Heaven Can Wait, on which this 1941 film was based. Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait was based on a play entitled Birthdays.