Heaven Can Wait
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Synopsis
Deceased turn-of-the-century playboy Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche) presents himself to the outer offices of Hades, where he asks a bemused Satan for permission to enter through the gates of hell. Though the devil doubts that Henry’s sins qualify him for eternal damnation, Henry proceeds to recount a lifetime of wooing and pursuing women, his long, happy marriage to Martha (Gene Tierney) notwithstanding. Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait, nominated for Academy Awards for best picture and director, is an enduring classic that showcases his trademark blend of wit, urbanity, and grace.
Picture 8/10
The Criterion Collection updates their DVD edition of Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait to Blu-ray, presenting the film in its original aspect ratio of 1.37:1 on a dual-layer disc. The new 1080p/24hz high-definition presentation comes from a new 4K restoration scanned from a 35mm color reversal negative, which in turn was made directly from the three-strip nitrate original camera negatives. The original DVD used an interpositive.
The original DVD still had its issues, mostly source related, pulsing and color-separation probably being the biggest problems. But outside of that I was always happy enough with the DVD. The new restoration really is a thing of beauty, though, delivering a far sharper and more stable image on this Blu-ray. The most substantial improvement is the lack of pulsing; I don’t recall it ever raising its ugly head. Despite not having access to the original three-strip negatives (the notes suggest they’re either gone or in terrible condition) the level of detail is still quite staggering, though the old-man make-up on Ameche looks worse thanks to it.
Colors are also more firm, separation not too big a concern, and they look wonderful in all of their Technicolor glory. Flesh tones look terrific, reds just pop beautifully, as do blues, and blacks manage to look deep and rich without destroying details. Everything has been encoded nicely as well, film grain rendered cleanly and there are no obvious artifacts to speak of. A real stunner of an upgrade over Criterion’s DVD.
Audio 6/10
The lossless PCM 1.0 mono track is limited by the film’s age: it’s clear enough and outside of some background noise its clean, but it’s flat and lacks and range or fidelity.
Extras 6/10
Everything appears to get ported over from the Criterion DVD, starting with a conversation between Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris that runs 25-minutes. Though I enjoyed the chat for what it is, it is quite general, just looking at what Lubitsch brings to the film, how it holds up, how it handles the passage of time (and how it ignores certain key events), while also recalling the charms they got from the film. As I said, it’s a perfectly fine discussion but didn’t feel there was anything all that revelatory to be found in it.
Criterion then adds a whole section about screenwriter Samson Raphaelson. First is a 29-minute 1982 episode of Creativity with Bill Moyers for PBS, which does offer a look at his career but has the bonus of showing Raphaelson teaching in class. This is an excellent inclusion, quite entertaining as well, but even better is an audio recording of Raphaelson at MOMA following a screening. The rather funny conversation features the screenwriter recalling his work with Lubitsch, how a writer can be creative in Hollywood (he feels filmmaking allows more creativity for the director), and so on. He also does a Q&A at the end. This runs 52-minutes
Criterion next provides 4-minutes’ worth of audio recordings of Lubitsch playing the piano, accompanied by an introduction by the filmmaker’s daughter Nicola Lubitsch, who recalls her fond memories of her father playing. It’s a charming little addition.
Criterion also ports over all of the marketing material, which includes a theatrical trailer, a gallery of publicity photos and various shots of the cast, along with photos of the original press book, which actually makes use of those publicity photos found in the previous gallery, but colorizes them. Criterion usually dumps the galleries so it was nice to see them here.
The release then closes with a small insert featuring the same essay on the film by William Paul, which covers some of the same areas Haskell and Sarris cover in their discussion. In the end it’s a fairly light set of features, but the material on Raphaelson proves to be incredibly strong, almost making up for any other shortcomings.
Closing
It’s disappointing Criterion didn’t feel the need to revisit the supplements, though they at least port everything over from their original DVD. Still, the new restoration and presentation offers a vast improvement and for that alone I do give this release a solid recommendation.
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