Angel On My Shoulder

This comedy-drama was based on a story by Harry Segall, author of the play Here Comes Mr. Jordan which had been filmed in 1941 with Claude Rains playing an angel finding a new body for Robert Montgomery. Segall inverts the metaphysics here with Rains as Satan who comes up top to put the condemned soul of a two-bit racketeer (Paul Muni) into the body of a respected judge that he, Satan, particularly dislikes, in an attempt to destroy his career.

The film is a somewhat conceptually-flawed moral fable (the interchange of personalities is disappointingly simplistic), with Mayo, best known for his Marx brothers films, showing little flair for the script's tongue-in-cheek humour, the end result unnecessarily sounding and looking very B-movie-ish instead of the zesty comedy it might have been. Muni, who had risen to stardom with Scarface (1931) had tried to make the transition to straight drama but with his career in decline by 1946 was prepared to bring his gangster persona out of the closet. Apparently a difficult production, it did not work for him and he would not make another film for eight years. Anne Baxter is unremarkable as the female lead.

 

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