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DOWN TO EARTH
Rating: 
USA. 1947.
Director – Alexander Hall, Screenplay – Edwin Blum & Don Hartman, Producer – Hartman, Photography – Rudolph Mate, Songs – Doris Fisher & Allan Roberts, Additional Music – George Duning & Heinz Roemheld, Music Supervisor – M.W. Stoloff, Art Direction – Stephen Goosson & Rudolf Sternad. Production Company – Columbia.
Cast:
Rita Hayworth (Terpsichore), Larry Parks (Danny Miller), Roland Culver (Mr Jordan), James Gleason (Max Corkle), Edward Everett Horton (Heavenly Messenger No 4013)
Plot: Up in the heavens the goddess Terpsichore is enraged to learn that young producer Danny Miller has created a Broadway musical ‘Swinging the Muses’ which vulgarizes her life. She goes to Mr Jordan, overseer of a soul’s passage into the afterlife, and requests permission to go down to Earth. Appearing as a mortal, she succeeds in obtaining the lead in the musical and then starts persuading Danny to mount it her way. In the course of this the two are attracted to one another. But then when the play done her way premieres it is a crashing disaster and the only way to rescue it is for Danny to go back and do it the vulgar way he originally intended.
Down to Earth is a semi-sequel to Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), a popular afterlife fantasy of a few year’s earlier. Although it’s really more a case of the Jordan (now played by Roland Culver), Max Corkle and Heavenly Messenger No 4013 characters having been grafted onto a different story. Certainly the original’s blend of nebulous Christian ecunemicism and this film’s tapping into Greek mythology making for rather strange theological bedfellows. The film itself becomes a remarkable celebration of the lowbrow – it has a rather unconcerned contempt for high art and happily claims the music hall as a triumphantly vulgar form of uniquely American culture. The surprise, when all is said and done however, is that the musical numbers are actually quite engagingly lively, with the exception of a rather silly playground sequence at the end. The story however has a lumbering ponderousness. It is a little fatuous to suggest that Terpsichore would be piqued at the Broadway vulgarization of her life when the film casts her and the Muses as a bunch of giggly schoolgirls.
The film was loosely remade as the Olivia Newton-John disco musical Xanadu (1980). This Down to Earth has caused some confusion of titles with the Chris Rock Down to Earth (2001) which is actually a remake of Here Comes Mr Jordan.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2013
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