Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1946)

One of Powell and Pressburger’s best:  the questionable reality of each of the worlds featured probably helped.  The World War II airman Peter Carter is trying to nurse home his mortally wounded Lancaster bomber; in the moments before he jumps out of the plane, without a parachute, he talks with an American radio operator called June, who’s based in England.  When Peter comes to on a deserted beach, we don’t know if he’s dreaming or in an afterlife or in the real world.  Sitting on a hillside above the beach is a boy pan-piper, serenading goats, who disorients us even more.  Peter meets June, cycling back from her night shift at the RAF base, and they fall in love.  There are scenes in heaven (though it’s never quite called that), visualised as a vast, futuristic bureaucracy – and one that’s less than perfectly competent:  Conductor 71, who was meant to be collecting Peter (when he died after leaving his plane) to escort him to the next world, misses him thanks to a thick fog over the English Channel.   We’re never sure how much of what we’re seeing is taking place only in Peter Carter’s mind (and, if it is, whether he’s thinking or imagining posthumously) but A Matter of Life and Death is so breezily entertaining that the uncertainty is part of the pleasure of the film.

From the very start, Powell and Pressburger combine high-flying visuals with earthbound English humour.  The screen is filled with stars and a voiceover comments on the universe ‘Big, isn’t it?’; planet Earth is described as ‘that little chap in the lower right-hand corner‘.  The fantastical qualities somewhat reduce the usual awkwardness of the Archers’ attempts at verbal wit – although it’s still embarrassing when Conductor 71, an aristocrat who lost his head in the French Revolution, describes the thwarting fog over the Channel, in a comedy-Gallic accent, as ‘Ow-you-zay – a peazooper?’.   If it’s right that Powell was the images and Pressburger the words in their collaborations, that awkwardness may partly reflect the fact that English wasn’t the Hungarian Pressburger’s native tongue.   But the Anglophilia is likeable here – particularly when it’s relatively unstressed, as in a conversation over tea in a church hall (with American GIs rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the background).  It also takes on a different dimension when we see, in the afterlife auditorium, the massed ranks of those who died in the recently-ended War.

David Niven (Peter Carter) is very relaxed – his relievingly light touch makes him genuinely charming.  Kim Hunter’s June has a solidity that comes over as appealing resoluteness.  The exchanges of them both with Roger Livesey are especially good.  Livesey’s a fine actor – he has, as well as a lovely voice, dignity without a trace of pomposity and a slightly clumsy athleticism that’s distinctive and winning.  He plays June’s friend Dr Reeves who becomes available (he dies in a road accident) to act as Peter’s counsel when the latter is pleading for his earthly existence to continue because he’s in love with June.   Marius Goring is merely doing a turn as Conductor 71; it becomes less irritating only because it gradually runs out of steam.  Raymond Massey is tedious as the prosecuting counsel in the celestial trial, a man who still blames the British for his death in the American War of Independence.  But Abraham Sofaer has a charismatic presence as the judge, Richard Attenborough registers strongly in his brief appearance as a pilot now on the other side, and Kathleen Byron is rather charming as a briskly beautiful angel.

The proceedings in the vast courtroom of the next world are the dramatic climax but not the best part of A Matter of Life and Death:  the point-making – culminating in the triumph of human love over inhuman law – is a bit too obvious here (and we already got the essential message through the prevailing colour scheme:  heaven is monochrome whereas human life is in Technicolor).  A book called ‘My Best Game of Chess’ appears at a couple of crucial points, including after the trial.   This and the shoreside sequence near the beginning naturally made me think of The Seventh Seal and wonder if Bergman had seen A Matter of Life and Death.  Probably not, and he certainly made it clear that a medieval church painting by Albertus Pictor was the inspiration for the man-playing-chess-with-death.  But the thought’s amusing because the temperaments of Powell and Pressburger are so utterly different from Bergman’s.

26 November 2010