Saturday Night Cinema: A Matter of Life and Death

Tonight I return to a much loved era of film-making - the golden age of British cinema. Regular Saturday Night cinemaphiles are well acquainted with my affection for British World War II and postwar cinema and most particularly the extraordinary British film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger - known as The Archers. Their collaborations - 24 films in all were original stories by Pressburger with the script written by both Pressburger & Powell. Past SCN selections include The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp and Peeping Tom. I have been unable to find two absolute Powell and Pressburger gems, The Red Shoes (brilliant!) and I Know Where I'm Going (delicious!), but we live in hope. Those two films are my own personal favorites, and I confess to recently watching I Know Where I'm Going a number of times.

Tonight's extraordinary film, A Matter of Life and Death (released in the States as A Stairway to Heaven), stars David Niven and Kim Darby. The screenplay for the film was partially inspired by Powell and Pressburger's desire to examine current U.S./Great Britain relations through a fantastical looking glass and by a true account of a Royal Air Force sergeant who leaped from a plane in flames and survived with only minor injuries. David Niven, who had so impressed Powell in his previous film, The Way Ahead (1944), was the director's first and only choice to play pilot Peter Carter. Niven, who had been out of the Hollywood spotlight for six years, later remarked, “Six months is too long for an actor to be out of business – six years is almost certain disaster.” Thanks to Powell, the actor's success in A Matter of Life and Death relaunched his career as an international leading man. The casting of female lead Kim Hunter, on the other hand, was attributed to Alfred Hitchcock who recommended her to Powell after working with the actress on several screen tests.

Stairway to Heaven (1946) is one of the most audacious films ever made - in its grandiose vision, and in the cozy English way it's expressed. The movie, which is being revived at the Music Box in a restored Technicolor print of dazzling beauty, joins the continuing retrospective at the Film Center of 15 other films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the most talented British filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s.

“This is the universe,” a voice says at the beginning of Stairway to Heaven. “Big, isn't it?” The camera pans across the skies - but the story, as it develops, is both awesome and intimate, suggesting that a single tear shed for love might stop heaven in its tracks.

The story opens inside the cockpit of a British bomber going down in flames over England in the last days of World War II. The pilot, Peter (David Niven), establishes radio contact with a ground controller, an American named June (Kim Hunter). Peter is unflappable in the face of death, and an instant rapport springs up between the two disembodied voices (“I love you, June. You're life, and I'm leaving it”). Then Peter jumps out of the plane before it crashes.

What follows is a breathtaking pastoral moment, as the pilot, somehow alive, washes ashore and sees a young woman, far away, riding her bicycle home. It is, of course, June, and soon they are deeply in love. But there is a problem. Peter was not intended to live. Heaven has made an error, and an emissary, Heavenly Conductor 71 (Maurice Goring) is sent to fetch him back. Peter refuses to go, and a heavenly tribunal is convened to settle the case. This fantasy is grounded in reality by a brain operation the pilot must undergo; perhaps his heavenly trial is only a by-product of the anesthetic. (Roger Ebert)

David Niven stars as Peter Carter, a dashing squadron leader who bails out of his stricken Lancaster bomber without a parachute. He awakens on a desolate Kent beach, completely unharmed. He goes on to fall in love with June (Kim Hunter), the American radio operator who talked him through what should have been his last few minutes on earth. Turns out Peter's miraculous survival is due to a clerical error in Heaven (although the word “Heaven” is scrupulously avoided in the script), and the celestial pencil-pushers dispatch an emissary to bring him back from the brink of life…

A Matter of Life and Death is one of Powell and Pressburger's warmest and wittiest pictures, and the pair are clearly having fun with all the visual effects at their disposal. The film inverts the famous switch of palette in The Wizard of Oz, presenting the fantasy world in stark monochrome and the earthly plane in vivid Technicolour, an effect still capable of drawing a gasp. It's eye-popping, from Jack Cardiff's luscious cinematography to Alfred Junge's awesome set design. The imagery remains influential, from the vision of an amusingly bureaucratic heaven to the vast stairway between the two worlds.

For all the eye candy on display, the film remains grounded due to the delightful chemistry between Niven and Hunter, and the ever-welcome presence of Roger Livesey as the charming doctor who believes Peter's visions could be the result of a brain injury.