Black & White World

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

I have a theory about Powell & Pressburger films, which is similar to the one I recently floated about the Marx Brothers—you always remember your first most fondly.  When speaking about the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the two films which seem to be widely regarded as their best are The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus—two films which don’t do much for me.  I don’t dislike them, but I’m not that captivated by ythem.  Just below them you’ll usually find The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp and I Know Where I’m Going!, my third- and second-favorites, respectively.  And then down below them is where you’ll usually find my favorite, A Matter of Life and Death, about on par with The 49th Parallel, which is the only film of the Archers that I’ve seen that I actively dislike.

I saw A Matter of Life and Death for the first time in July of 2004.  It was recommended by my friend Mike, under circumstances that I no longer recall.  I knew nothing about it when I sat down to watch it other than that David Niven was in it, and it was directed by two guys I’d been reading a lot about in the online film community—Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger.  And Mike said it was really good—Mike’s rarely steered me wrong.

Brief plot outline:  David Niven plays Peter Carter, an English RAF pilot during World War II.  Returning from a bombing mission, he bails out without a parachute, jumping to what he believes will be his certain death.  However, due to a heavenly administrative error (his Conductor misses him in the heavy English fog), he survives.  He almost immediately meets and falls in love with an American WREN named June (Kim Hunter), so that when the Conductor follows up 24 hours later, Peter now feels he has something to live for, and refuses to go along, instead asking for an appeal from the higher powers.

My first reaction to the movie was probably the same as most people’s:  against expectation, the films that take place in heaven are photographed in stark black & white, and the sequences that take place on earth are in glorious Technicolor.  The black & white photography turns heaven into a cold and clinical place, run by clerks, bean counters and paper pushers.  The camera work (by Jack Cardiff) and special effects are great, making heaven seem impossibly huge and densely populated.

It’s worth noting, too, that the word “heaven” is uttered exactly once in the script—a recently deceased young man marvels as he views endless rows of desk clerks filling out balance sheets, murmuring (again, quite against expectation): “It’s like heaven.” Powell and Pressburger go out of their way to differentiate between small-h heaven and capital-H Heaven—there’s no mention of religion, or God, and in fact the film allows for the very real possibility that it’s all just going on in Carter’s mind anyway.

A Matter of Life and Death has a bit of an agenda.  It was meant to help foster post-War relations between Great Britain and the United States.  Which makes it doubly puzzling, then, that it was released in the United States under a different title, Stairway to Heaven—the exact word the creators worked so hard to avoid throughout the movie.  This agenda also bogs the movie down quite a bit in the third act, casting Peter and June as the star-crossed lovers designed to bring the Hatfield-and-McCoy-like feud to an end.  Unfortunately, it slows down the narrative, and because it’s introduced so late in the film it feels out of place and disorienting.

David Niven, a highly underrated actor with all the comic timing of Cary Grant, lends a humanism to Peter Carter, a role that easily could have been bogged down in overwrought selfless nobility in the hands of a lesser performer.  Kim Hunter does a good job in an underdeveloped role as June.  She has little to do but gaze lovingly and sob silently and sacrifice heroically, but her headlong and constantly-in-jeopardy romance with Niven is completely believeable.  She takes a small role and makes it memorable.  Roger Livesey, whose character I haven’t even had time to delve into here, is excellent as always in a crucial supporting role.

The whole movie could easily have collapsed under the weight of the saccharine theme of love-conquers-death, as many others have (Ghost comes to mind).  But the romance and fantasy are balanced nicely by darker themes of death and eternity, and a sly, gentle humor pervades throughout, never allowing the movie to take itself too seriously.

And somehow, even though the afterlife is portrayed as a stark bureaucratic place, it doesn’t seem like a bad place to go when it’s all over.  Clearly, though, the emphasis in this post-war world is a celebration of life, in living color.  I’ve loved many films helmed by The Archers since viewing A Matter of Life and Death, but none captivated me quite so completely.

Posted just in time for:

The Powell & Pressburger Blog-a-Thon, presented by Beyond the Valley of the Cinefiles

1. Damn.  I was trying to steer you wrong.

   I love the Powell/Pressburger Archers logo (seen here).  My favorites:

   1. A Matter Of Life And Death
   2. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp
   3. Black Narcissus
   4. The Red Shoes
   5. A Canterbury Tale

   Posted by  on  12/22  at  10:45 PM

2. It may cheer you to know that when I saw Michael Powell give a talk at the NYPL, less than two years before he died, he unhesitatingly named this film as his personal favorite.

   Posted by Campaspe  on  01/06  at  11:10 AM
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