This is the universe. Big, isn’t it? ✵ A Matter of Life and Death - A GOLDEN AGE IN BLACK AND WHITE ✵ 1931–1949 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

RG

RG

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Wartime fantasy

DIRECTORS

Michel Powell, Emeric Pressburger

WRITERS

Michel Powell, Emeric Pressburger

STARS

David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Marius Goring, Katherine Byron

BEFORE

1943 Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is based on a British comic-strip character.

AFTER

1947 Black Narcissus is a psychological drama set in a convent in the Himalayas.

1960 Powell’s dark thriller Peeping Tom is savaged by the critics. His career never recovers.

A Matter of Life and Death is the story of a young British bomber pilot, Peter Carter (David Niven), whose aircraft is damaged over the English Channel, leading him into an epic fight to live.

In the memorable opening sequence, the camera tracks across stars and distant galaxies. “This is the universe,” a narrator informs us amid the twinkling. “Big, isn’t it?” Eventually, we home in on a view of Europe from space, then zoom into the interior of the bomber. The camera pans to reveal Peter sending a final radio message before he must jump without a parachute. He jumps… and to his and our surprise, wakes on a deserted beach. The angelic guide Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), sent to bring him to Heaven, has missed him, and he has survived by mistake. After meeting and falling in love with the American radio operator June (Kim Hunter) he was speaking to just before jumping, Peter appeals to the celestial authorities against the attempt to elevate him to “the Other World.” The rest of the movie shows Peter negotiating his appeal before a heavenly court.

"Life, empowered by love, triumphs over everything, Powell seems to conclude."

J. G. Ballard
The Guardian, 2005

RG

Peter fights for his life after surviving the crash. The movie plays with the possibility that heaven is a product of Peter’s delirious mind.

Special effects

The transitions between Heaven and Earth inspire a host of dizzyingly inventive special effects. A ping-pong match is frozen mid-action. A spilled table of books rights itself. Can any of this be real, or is Peter imagining it all? In a reversal of expectations, heaven is portrayed not as a colorful paradise, but in subtle silvery monochrome—streamlined and modernist, with bright amphitheaters and shiny spaces. It is, in fact, all quite soulless. But on Earth, life goes on in Technicolor.

RG

It was released in the US as Stairway to Heaven, a reference to the escalator linking Earth to the afterlife.

Wartime message

Originally developed during World War II, the British Ministry of Information encouraged Powell and Pressburger to use the movie to promote Anglo-American relations, frayed by the presence of US servicemen in the UK. As such, the heavenly legal battle is less about the merits of Peter’s case than easing transatlantic tensions. When the American prosecutor questions whether an Englishman and a Boston girl could really ever be happy together, the answer may not surprise you—but it’s still a wonderfully human note in a deceptively strange movie, brimming with imagination.

MICHAEL POWELL AND EMERIC PRESSBURGER Directors

Michael Powell (right) was born in Kent, UK, in 1905. Emeric Pressburger (left) was born in Hungary in 1902. Pressburger worked in Germany as a screenwriter before fleeing the Nazis in 1935 and moving to Britain, where he began a productive collaboration with Powell. Their production company, The Archers, made 24 movies, sealing their reputations with classics such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. Their last movie was the wartime story Ill Met by Moonlight (1957). In 1960, Powell made the psychological thriller Peeping Tom. Now considered a masterpiece, it was vilified on its release and all but ended Powell’s career. He made one more movie, Age of Consent (1969), and died in 1990. Pressburger had died two years earlier.

Key movies

1943 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

1947 Black Narcissus

1948 The Red Shoes

What else to watch: Between Two Worlds (1944) ✵ It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) ✵ Black Narcissus (1947) ✵ Heaven Can Wait (1978)