Heaven Can Wait (1943)

Ernst Lubitsch’s “Heaven Can Wait”

Thematic Elements: 

Ernst Lubitsch’s “Heaven Can Wait” is a film about life, love, and loss. It is a story that encompasses a man’s entire lifetime, from the age of 14 until his death about fifty years later. The film takes the form of a biopic but applies its conventions to a character of no significance or importance. In doing this, Lubitsch takes everyday events and conveys the pretentions that biopics exaggeratedly place on them to make events of little or no dramatic importance significant in themselves. As Lubitsch says about this film, the protagonist “was interested in good living, with no aim of accomplishing anything, or doing anything noble.” The story even fails to mention any of the events happening outside of Henry’s immediately life. The story is told in flashbacks and takes place between 1886 and 1940. By those metrics, the film should have mentioned all the many wars, the stock market collapse, or any other significant event of that time. The lack of any sort of mention of outside events narrows the focus of the story strictly to Henry and the personal events happening immediately around them. This turns the periodic events of an everyday person into monumental happenings of great significance. Henry recalls his first love, drinking for the first time, falling in love with Martha, losing Martha, getting her back, his children, his parents, his grandparents, and all the noteworthy events worth remembering at the time of this death. Where Henry’s life seems insignificant, the telling of the story to the devil for the cause of his own innocence also presents this insignificant life in a most significant way. Lubitsch is instilling a sense of reflection and nostalgia to the viewer about their own life and the meaning they derive from it. The values that Henry places on the people and things around him can only be valuable to him. But this can call on us to question what we value as well and what we will remark on at our eventual death. Henry tells the devil that he is certainly destined for hell for the way he behaved in his life. However, when recalling all of these events, they are shown to us through his nostalgic perspective. This nostalgic lens presents his life far more beautifully and wonderfully than his original pessimism suggested. We do not see Henry’s faults, errors, and mistakes, but we simply see a man’s life full of love, family, and personal conflict and triumph. Lubitsch is showing us glimpses of the life of man who didn’t realize how he was cherishing and valuing his own life. But with the scale and scope of one person’s life comes the familiar understanding of the forward motion of time and its ever-changing nature. As the events of the story present themselves in different interludes, it becomes clear that the hands of time are taking their rigorous affect on the Henry, the characters, and the world around them. After every interval, a death occurs – Grandma dies after the first interval, Henry’s father after the second, Grandpa after the third, and eventually Henry’s wife Martha passes as well. This sets us up with the expectation of loss after elapsed time, creating a morbid tone. This new element of loss gets added to the nostalgic reflection to create a balanced melancholic yet affirming mediation on one’s life. All the characters seem to have a hard time adjusting to the changing of time. Henry’s family is one of old money, uncertain about the industrialization that has come about with the turn of the century. Martha’s family are presented as being new money to Henry’s family’s old money, in which they own their own meat distribution company in Kansas. However, they too seem to be stuck in the past as they cannot let go of their late 19th century Southern lifestyle, accompanied by their black servants and their unwillingness to let go of their own egos for the sake of their marriage. Henry too seems troubled by the moving of time. This is apparent when he tries to pick up a young woman who mocks him for being too old for her and tells him that she is dating his son. He becomes distressed at the notion that his debonair playboy days are over and that is he too old to be participating in that kind of world anymore. Henry in his youth was accepting of this change when it was his parent’s way of life changing to fit his. As his childhood love, the Mademoiselle said, “If that’s the way things are in 1887, what do you think is going to happen in 1888?” She said this to Henry when he was upset that he was to marry one particular girl and couldn’t go out with many girls. The Mademoiselle was trying to tell young Henry that times change – what is acceptable by societies standard today will be completely different tomorrow – something Henry became excited over. However, this excitement diminished later in his life when he learned that his way of life too would move on to something new. All these marks on Henry’s life accumulate to a final realization that his life was worth living, all the relationships worth having, and the changes and difficulties worth going through. Lubitsch illuminates a man’s life to show us how times change, life becomes death, and love will be remembered. 

Camerawork: 

Lubitsch’s first color film uses color very specifically to convey the characters’ attitudes and to convey the passing of time. As Henry and Martha first meet, the technicolor purples, pinks, and blues suggest to the audience a blooming romance. This contrasts greatly with the darker blue, maroon, and green of both 1887 Manhattan and Kansas. Lubitsch also utilizes the colors and visual styles of Kansas to suggest Kansas is stuck in the past, using colors and settings that convey a more mid-18th century appearance. This contrasts with the bright urban tones that visually infuse Henry’s New York lifestyle with a sense of whimsy, which the dark and stormy Kansas seems to be bereft of. The present and ever-growing world Henry positions himself in embraces the changes movement of life, whereas the darker Kansas seems inept at moving forward, become ever drearier in its stagnation. However, as Henry becomes increasingly older and increasingly more clutched to his past, the colors grow increasingly muted in the ever-altering settings and costumes as the film moves up the present – bright reds and deep blues, both saturated and lively in their distinction of warm and cold tones, which then yield to ivories and then pale whites. The characters’ world stop becoming new, exciting, and colorful and starts becoming more hushed and paler. This change occurs without the characters remarking on noticing the change, as if the natural change of life and the attitude towards it happens mysteriously and without notice. Lubitsch’s carefully crafted use of color creates a world that mirrors the attitudes of its characters, creating a sense of excitement, newness, and change at the start of a life, only to becomes more dim and melancholy towards the end of one’s life as one struggles to adapt to the changing of times and the changing of themselves. 

Best Shot: 

The below shots will illustrate this subtle changing of these color tones, as they more from very saturated in Henry’s childhood to become more and more hushed and desaturated as he becomes older.