Angel on My Shoulder (1946)
A murdered gangster is sent to Hell, where the Devil strikes a bargain to send him back to Earth inhabiting the body of an upstanding judge — only for conscience and an unexpected romance to complicate the scheme.
Paul Muni plays the double role opposite Claude Rains’s wry, needling Devil in Angel on My Shoulder, Archie Mayo’s last film as director; its afterlife bureaucracy sits comfortably alongside the era’s other angel-and-devil comedies, from Here Comes Mr. Jordan to Heaven Can Wait.
Background
Angel on My Shoulder was directed by Archie Mayo in what turned out to be his final film, from a screenplay by Harry Segall and Roland Kibbee, with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Paul Muni plays a murdered gangster, Eddie Kagle, who is sent to Hell and strikes a bargain with the Devil, played by Claude Rains, to be sent back to Earth inhabiting the body of an upstanding judge. Production ran long: Muni, Rains, and Mayo all came down with the flu during filming, stretching a scheduled nine-week shoot to thirteen weeks, and Mayo and Muni clashed repeatedly over how scenes should be played.
What to watch for
Claude Rains plays the Devil as dry and needling rather than menacing, closer to an exasperated bureaucrat than a figure of dread, and the film is worth watching for how that tone sets it apart from the more whimsical afterlife comedies of the period, such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan and Heaven Can Wait. Muni’s double performance, gangster and judge sharing one body and one set of mannerisms, asks him to signal the switch through posture and voice rather than makeup, and the friction between Mayo and Muni during filming is sometimes visible in scenes that feel oddly deliberate rather than naturalistic.
