Robert Montgomery in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
Vitals
Robert Montgomery as Joe Pendleton, prizefighter and pilot known as “The Flying Pug”
En route New York City, Spring 1941
Film: Here Comes Mr. Jordan
Release Date: August 7, 1941
Director: Alexander Hall
Costume Designer: Edith Head (gowns)
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
Perhaps one of the first true “Renaissance men” in Hollywood, Robert Montgomery was born 120 years ago today on May 21, 1904 in New York’s Hudson Valley. Montgomery displayed a versatile range across movies and television, his comedic and dramatic abilities resulting in two Academy Award nominations and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was also an inventive director, pioneering an unusual but daring first-person narrative style for his 1947 directorial debut Lady in the Lake, adapted from Raymond Chandler’s pulp novel of the same name.
When World War II began in Europe, Montgomery enlisted for the American Field Service in London and drove ambulances in France up through the famous Dunkirk evacuation. After the United States entered the war a year and a half later, Montgomery joined the U.S. Navy and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander.
Amidst all this, Montgomery received his second Oscar nomination for his performance as the charismatic, saxophone-playing boxer Joe Pendleton in the smart supernatural comedy Here Comes Mr. Jordan, based on Harry Segall’s 1938 play Heaven Can Wait. (Segall’s title would be used for the 1978 remake starring Warren Beatty, reimagining Joe as a professional football player.) Montgomery stars among an excellent supporting cast that includes Claude Rains, James Gleason, and Edward Everett Horton as the over-eager angel who delivers Joe to death fifty years before his time.
Known as “The Flying Pug” for the intersection of his prizefighting career and his interest in aviation, Joe’s solo flight to his next fight in New York City meets disaster when a a mechanical error sends the single-engine plane plummeting toward the ground. Anticipating the inevitable, the celestial messenger #7013 (Horton) retrieves Joe’s soul from his body before the crash… only for it to be revealed that he misread a clerical error and Joe wasn’t scheduled to die until May 11, 1991—a full half-century later.
“Fifty years to go yet! You certainly pulled a boner this time,” Joe barks at the officious #7013 upon finding out he should still be alive. As Joe’s loyal manager “Pop” Corkle (Gleason) already had the body cremated, the debonair afterlife administrator Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains) intervenes to find a solution—in the form of a freshly dead body that Joe’s soul can occupy until a more permanent solution can be found for Joe to resume his boxing career.
What’d He Wear?
When not clad in boxing robes or avaricious millionaire Bruce Farnsworth’s handsomely tailored wardrobe (after taking over his body), Joe Pendleton wears the same clothes he “died” in, anchored by a belted leather flying jacket he wore at the controls of his ill-fated plane.
In the decades following the widespread adoption of brown leather jackets for military aviation, horsehide leather flying jackets had become increasingly popular by the start of the 1940s as made by companies like Bormcolt, Golden Fleece, and Sears. The belted waist kept a trim profile comfortable for the confines of a cockpit and prevented excess fabric from flapping around, and “bi-swing” pleats behind the armholes gave operators a greater range of movement. In addition to the resilience and protection offered by leather, these specific elements made this type of jacket particularly favorable among pilots and motorcyclists through the interwar era. As a result, leather jackets grew increasingly associated with daredevil pastimes, resulting in a rebellious connotation reinforced by countercultural icons like Marlon Brando’s bad boy biker in the 1953 drama The Wild One.
Joe’s thigh-length leather jacket with its belted waist aligns more with the flying coats authorized for World War I-era pilots than the sleek and shorter flight jackets like the A-2 that would be famously worn by USAAF pilots during World War II. The length also could qualify it as a “car coat”.
Almost certainly made from brown leather (despite the black-and-white photography), Joe’s jacket has a straight-zip front that begins just below the waist, a few inches above the rounded quarters of the front skirt. The zipper extends up to the neck, where the jacket’s large curved edge-stitched collar lays flat. In addition to the zipper, a full edge-stitched self-belt encircles the waist, fastened through a single-prong buckle and pulled through a leather self-keeper.
The set-in sleeves are finished with plain cuffs, and a horizontal yoke extends across the chest. The back is devoid of yokes or vents, with the aforementioned bi-swing pleats behind each shoulder. The straight set-in hip pockets are each covered by a large rectangular flap.
Joe wears the jacket over a collared, short-sleeved pullover shirt—a style that originated over a decade earlier when French tennis champion René Lacoste debuted his piqué cotton shirts during the 1926 U.S. Open. Easy-to-wear yet presentable, these sporty tennis shirts were soon adopted as leisure-wear in men’s wardrobes whether they were handling a racquet or a saxophone, with elegant evolutions like the soft-knit shirt that Montgomery wears in Here Comes Mr. Jordan.
(Through this half of the 20th century, the term “polo shirt” more frequently referred to the Brooks Brothers-born style of button-down collar; after Ralph Lauren included tennis shirts into the launch of his Polo-branded menswear line in the 1970s, the “polo shirt” shorthand transitioned to refer to what were traditionally called “tennis shirts” and—despite its nearly 50-year head-start—the original “tennis shirt” nomenclature all but faded against the estimable Mr. Lauren’s mighty marketing machine. But I digress…)
Joe’s short-sleeved shirt is horizontally multi-striped in three different shades—a light, a medium, and a dark—with a solid medium-colored collar and a two-button top that he wears with both buttons fastened.
The full skirt of Joe’s jacket (which he never wears unzipped or unbelted) covers the top of his trousers, which are made from a light-colored woolen flannel. As suggested by their full fit through Montgomery’s thighs and the prevailing trends of the era, the trousers are likely pleated and slightly taper down the legs to the bottoms, finished with turn-ups (cuffs).
Joe’s trouser bottoms have such a full break that we don’t see much of his footwear, aside from the oxford-laced leather uppers made from such a dark calfskin that I suspect they’re black. We also don’t see enough of these cap-toe shoes’ profile to know how high the uppers rise, but—given that low shoes would be incongruously dressy with such an informal outfit—it would make the most sense for practical and contextual purposes for Joe to be wearing boots.
How to Get the Look
Robert Montgomery in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
Joe Pendleton controls his plane while wearing a belted leather jacket and horizontal polo shirt that are surprisingly modern for the early 1940s.
- Brown horsehide leather thigh-length car coat with straight-zip front, large curved collar, full self-belt (with single-prong buckle), straight flapped set-in hip pockets, set-in sleeves with plain cuffs, and ventless back
- Horizontal multi-striped soft-knit short-sleeved two-button polo shirt
- Light woolen flannel pleated trousers with turn-ups/cuffs
- Black calfskin leather plain-toe oxford boots
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the movie.
The Quote
A guy’s no good if he isn’t himself.
The post Here Comes Mr. Jordan: Robert Montgomery’s Belted Leather Jacket appeared first on BAMF Style.