A Matter of Life and Death, aka Stairway to Heaven (1946)

I admit I’ve been kind of putting off this review because there is just so much great stuff in this movie that I didn't know where to start. Now my favorite Powell/Pressburger film, it is a lament for the young solders that died in World War II, as well as a plea for the continuation of strong Anglo-American relations now that the war is over. The film concerns Peter Carter (David Niven) a British bomber pilot and budding poet, who in a severely damaged aircraft and without a parachute, knowing he is going to die, strikes up a remarkable conversation with the American WAC (Kim Hunter) ’manning’ the radio tower at Carters home base. Carter should have died shortly there after, but was missed by the ‘Conductor’ (a delightful Marius Goring as a fmr. French aristocrat beheaded in the “so called glorious revolution“) assigned to escort him to the afterlife. In short time the mistake is noticed, and Goring’s Conductor 71 is sent down to Earth to fetch the pilot, who is as surprised as anybody by his miraculous survival. Carter won’t go quietly up to ‘heaven’ with his Conductor however, in the time he mistakenly inherited he has fallen in love with the same American girl he had conversed with over the radio earlier. Carter argues that it was not his fault that he survived and fell in love, but he did and has now “incurred new responsibilities” and deserves a chance at a life with June. An appeal is filed, and Carter must now find some one among the deceased to argue his case against the court appointed prosecutor (an amusingly stern performance by Raymond Massey), a Boston born lawyer who died in the American Revolution, hates the British, and is thus very much opposed to bending the rules to allow for this trans-Atlantic romance.

All the while we have June and local doctor Frank Reeves (another great performance by the one of a kind Roger Livesey) semi-humoring Peter, while trying to find a way to deal with what they suspect is a massive, potently fatal brain injury. Whether Peters angelic visitations, and the modernist after life we see on screen, are real or just transpiring in Carters mind, is left ambiguous, though the film went out of its way to be true to the neuroscience of the time. This is a wonderfully contemplative film, there are so many ideas to think about, performances to savoir, and unique visuals to behold. Most notable among the visual motifs is the black and white modernist heaven (while the Earth is shown in a vibrant Technicolor, prompting one of the best lines in the film). This after life, never explicably refer to buy its ‘employees’ as heaven, is devoid of traditional Christian imagery, and is instead a kind of socialist paradise, where everyone is equal, and has a job. Unlike most anything you’ve seen, A Matter of Life and Death could have been played any of a number of different ways, but the film makers play it mostly straight, fully endearing , and with the proverbial good-natured little sparkle in their eyes. Another Powell/Pressburger triumph, 5 out of 5.