Angel on My Shoulder (1946)
Directed by Archie Mayo

Film Review

It was presumably the immense success of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) which resulted in its writer Harry Segall reworking the same plotline for another film, Angel on My Shoulder, the principal difference being that the main character is let out of Hell rather than Heaven. Claude Rains returns to play the After Life 'governor', here completely at home in the role of Satan himself, presented to us as a debonair disciple of Machiavelli with a penchant for understated sarcasm.  Having distinguished himself in a number of important fantasy roles - notably in James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) and Arthur Lubin's Phantom of the Opera (1943)  - Rains had by now acquired a knack of playing inhuman characters with an intoxicating human charm, and there was probably no other actor in Hollywood at the time who was better suited to play the Devil.

Oddly mirroring his character in the film, Paul Muni gets a second shot at playing the kind of character that first brought him notoriety and respect, the psychopathic gangster.   Having triumphed in the part of the gangster boss in Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932), Muni was reluctant ever to play it again, and producers Charles R. Rogers and David W. Siegel had a hard job persuading the actor to take on the role in Angel in My Shoulder.  By this time, Muni's career was on a downwards trajectory so it was probably out of necessity that the actor finally agreed to appear in the film in the hope of raising his public profile.

Whilst the casting of Muni opposite Rains (two actors who could not be more different) is inspired, the experience of making the film was not a happy one for either actor.  Both men succumbed to a severe bout of influenza during the shoot (along with co-star Anne Baxter and director Archie Mayo), delaying the production by a month, and Muni had a running battle with Mayo over the nature of his role.  Muni had hoped to make a more serious film about a bad man's redemption; Mayo just wanted to knock out another crowd-pleasing comedy.  This tension shows in the final film, which shows an awkward identity crisis, being neither as remotely funny as Here Comes Mr. Jordan nor as profound as Muni had intended.  No wonder the critics and audiences failed to take to the film.  The decidedly lukewarm reaction received by Angel on My Shoulder led Muni to turn his back on cinema; he would spend the next six years working in theatre before Joseph Losey lured him back in front of the camera for his penultimate screen role in Stranger on the Prowl  (1952), another misfire.

Angel on My Shoulder suffers from comparison with Here Comes Mr. Jordan.  Judged on its own merits, it is a pleasant enough film, its main attraction being the crackling repartee between Rains and Muni, which both actors milk for all it is worth.  Not a natural comedic performer, Muni made the right choice in playing his character unswervingly straight, allowing Rains to extract the maximum number of laughs by subtly playing off the absurdity of the situation.  For all his surface charm, Rains' Mephistopheles is an unmistakably human character, not unlike a chat show host who barely manages to keep his cool when placed alongside a particularly annoying interviewee who clearly thinks too much of himself.  (You can't help wondering if the ego-stroking we see on screen was something Rains felt obliged to do off camera, to prevent Muni from walking off the picture.)

There are some touching moments when Muni glimpses the life he might have, with Anne Baxter to keep him on the straight and narrow, but it is the Rains-Muni double act that makes the film worth watching.  Whereas all too many fantasy films of this era are let down by some dodgy special effects, Angel on My Shoulder holds up remarkaby well in this respect. The opening scenes set in the fiery pits of Hell are quite impressive, even if they look like something out of an expressionistic German film of the 1920s, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) being an obvious point of reference...

Film Synopsis

On his release from prison, Eddie Kagle's only thought is to recover the ill-gotten gains from the robbery that led to his arrest.  Unfortunately, his gangster partner Smiley Williams has other ideas and hastily puts a bullet in him.  The next thing he knows, Eddie is wandering through a stinking subterranean hole that turns out to be Hell.  In no time, he manages to get himself on the wrong side of the Devil, a mischievous charmer who likes to be called Nick.  As luck would have it, Eddie is the exact double of the mortal who is giving Nick a hard time, a do-gooder lawyer named Fred Parker.  Nick offers Eddie the chance of returning to the land of the living so that he can take revenge on Smiley on condition that he takes possession of Parker's body and ruins the lawyer's reputation.  Eddie agrees but Nick's carefully thought through plan soon backfires as Eddie unwittingly saves Parker from his political opponents.  Things become even more complicated when Eddie falls in love with Parker's attractive fiancée, Barbara...