Tag Archives: Claude Rains

Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941)

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Considering I’d reviewed Jhuk Gaya Aasmaan last week, and that was based on Here Comes Mr Jordan, it seemed appropriate to follow up that review with this one. I hadn’t heard of Here Comes Mr Jordan before, though I have seen a later film (Ernest Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait) which was based on the same story—and which, interestingly, retained the name of the original story. Heaven Can Wait, as it turned out, is quite different from Here Comes Mr Jordan.

This story begins by introducing us to prizefighter Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) as he trains somewhere out in the country while his manager and good friend Max Corkle (James Gleason) looks on. Joe is in fine form and is looking forward to an upcoming fight which can get him within arm’s reach of the world championship.

Pendleton and Max, after the sparring

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The Seahawk (1940)

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Another offering for Flynn Week.

It was said, at one time, that if Bette Davis was the queen of Warner Brothers, Errol Flynn was the king. And a king, too, with a lineage that was astounding, to say the least. The Tasmanian-born Flynn spent a few years as a young man in Papua New Guinea holding down jobs as varied (and in some cases illegal) as diamond smuggler, slave recruiter, gold prospector, sheep castrator, and manager of tobacco and coconut plantations, before washing up in the big bad world of cinema. Flynn’s first role was as his own ancestor, Fletcher Christian, a mutineer on the HMS Bounty; two years later, opposite Olivia de Havilland (who was a very distant relative of his), Flynn acted as the pirate Captain Blood—and the king of swashbucklers had arrived.

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