The official logo for the Archers, the filmmaking team formed by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell, was an arrow striking a bullseye. This may seem an unseemly piece of arrogance, and an invitation to hold whatever followed to an absurdly high standard, such being the promise of quality that the bullseye entails. But the Archers always lived up to their promise, again and again delivering some of the most ravishing works in cinema history. Some of their classics include The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, Tales of Hoffman, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, masterpieces all, films that have delighted and inspired future masters ranging from Martin Scorsese to George A. Romero.
And for all that, their masterpiece-among-masterpieces may be the majestic, soul-enriching wonder that is A Matter of Life and Death (originally released in the States as Stairway to Heaven [eat it, Zep]).
One of the greatest films ever made, a humanistic fantasy on a par with It’s a Wonderful Life, A Matter of Life and Death juxtaposes its central love story with the concerns of both war and the cosmos, not as a means to belittle that love but to illustrate why those silly, fragile bonds that exist between people are so incredibly important in the grand scheme of the world and the universe. Endlessly witty, visually astonishing, achingly romantic, if A Matter of Life and Death isn’t part of your collection then you are doing something wrong.
A Matter of Life and Death announces its mastery in its opening, perhaps the single greatest opening salvo in cinema history (and a scene that will seem verrrrrry familiar to anyone who loves Captain America: The First Avenger). It’s night over Europe, and British Squadron Leader Peter Carter (David Niven) is in a plane wrapped in fire and trapped over water. He has no parachute, no place to land, and no chance of survival. In a desperate last act, he radios to the nearest station and speaks with June (Kim Hunter), an American servicewoman, not to ask for rescue (he knows there will be no chance of that) but simply to share his last moments with someone, anyone, one last connection with life before surrendering his time with it.
Carter leaps from his plane, only to be utterly puzzled when he wakes up the next morning on a beach, having somehow survived unharmed.
Also utterly puzzled: The amassed forces of the afterlife, who have Carter listed as being due for the pearly gates. It seems an inconvenient fogbank shrouded Carter from Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), preventing the angelic guide from ushering Carter from one world to the next. But when the Conductor goes to collect Carter, the pilot protests. He’s fallen in love with June, and he doesn’t find it especially fair that he and June are to be punished for an error that was not their own.
The film toggles between these two worlds: In one realm, Carter frantically prepares for a trial before the court of the Other World, while back on earth, an equally frantic June reaches out to her friend Dr. Frank Reeves (Colonel Blimp himself, Roger Livesey), an expert in neurology, in the hope that he can unlock a medical explanation for Carter’s visions of angelic messengers and otherworldly judicial systems.
Crucially, Powell and Pressburger never say whether the Other World is a real place or simply a fabrication within the wounded, traumatized mind of a soldier coming off a close brush with death. There is ample evidence for either side, but what matters is that the visitations to, and the visitors from, the Other World feel real to Carter, and so his life truly does hang in the balance of the court’s ultimate decision. Powell and Pressburger also take great pains to create an afterlife that is free from any particular denomination. This is spirituality that, like Hogarth’s speech on the nature of the soul in The Iron Giant, is free from dogmatic rigidity.
The script by Powell and Pressburger is itself free from the kind of rigidity we see in so many other films. As in other works by the Archers, the film shifts genres so easily as to slip through any of categorization, like the way Black Narcissus morphs into a proto-slasher film in its last reel, or how magic is woven into the margins of the usually earthbound The Red Shoes. Carter and June’s journey back to each other takes numerous twits and turns that may have you gasping and gaping, but none of these pivots are unearned or done for the sake of shock.
Perhaps A Matter of Life and Death’s most famous device is the way it depicts this Other World. While the real world is realized in heartstoppingly gorgeous Technicolor, the Other World appears in high-contrast black and white (achieved by shooting on Technicolor stock but then under-developing the film). The result is that while the vistas of the Other World are bewitching and evocative, it is the world of roses, the English countryside, and Kim Hunter that truly seems divine.
“One is starved for Technicolor up there,” Goring’s Conductor murmurs at one point, a fourth wall shattering wink that is more than amply armed. With Jack Cardiff behind the camera as cinematographer, how can Heaven hope to compare?
This is delicate material that requires careful maintenance over tone, but to a person the ensemble delivers as needed. Niven and Hunter (in one of her first roles, plucked out of obscurity thanks to a recommendation from Alfred Hitchcock) make a remarkable central couple, more than earning the true love the film hinges on. This is some of the most sincere, vulnerable work I’ve ever seen from Niven, while Hunter is positively luminous.
Livesey, for his part, was perhaps the greatest collaborator the Archers ever had in front of the camera (it’s between him and Anton Walbrook), and his performance as Dr. Reeves is a highlight in a partnership that was nothing but highlights. Reeves is a man of science, but there’s a romantic core to him that responds to the plight of Carter and June, and Livesey conveys it beautifully, often without words.
As the Conductor, Goring is a merry treat, handed droll punchline after droll punchline and hitting home runs each and every time. Goring would prove equally adept at playing the tragic romantic lead when he next paired with Powell and Pressburger in The Red Shoes, but here he gets to make a big meal out of a trickster character of whose loyalties you can never entirely be sure. The Conductor is irritated by how Carter’s protesting makes him look, but he also can’t help but like the guy. Of course, liking the guy doesn’t mean that the Conductor won’t intermittently try to trick Carter into giving up his life, but hey, he’s got a job to do.
It’s that level of care, going into even a smaller supporting role, that helps explain why Powell and Pressburger were able to create such towering works. As writers and directors, they continue to find small grace notes and moments of beauty, like the way every soldier seen arriving at the Other World has a unique and distinct reaction, not least of which is a quiet awe expressed by a young British soldier (played by Richard Attenborough!). There’s no role so small it doesn’t deserve some character, no person so small that they don’t have a role to play.
Maybe that’s why I hold A Matter of Life and Death so highly among their considerable catalogue. Even as they were surrounded by death and destruction, living through one of the most terrifying, uncertain eras in history, Powell and Pressburger made films that celebrated what was beautiful in life, what was worth fighting for. Not in a jingoistic, might makes right kind of way, but in a way that expressed a certainty that there were good things in this world, and those good things existed despite all the ugliness also alive and sometimes flourishing.
The disc by Criterion is itself a thing of beauty, featuring a new 4K transfer that allows this already-gorgeous film to be even more lush and eye-poppingly splendid than ever before. The Technicolor scenes almost glow off the screen, while the black-and-white of the Other World is crisp and stark. Special features include interviews with Martin Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Powell’s widow), as well as features getting into both A Matter of Life and Death’s making and its legacy.
I’ve probably dragged this out for far too long when all I’m trying to say is something entirely simple: This is one of the best movies ever made, and this is perhaps the single best presentation it has ever received. Buy it.