Either individually or as a team, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a number of highly distinctive films that venture into EOFFTV territory, from the troubled extravaganza The Thief of Bagdad (1940) to the enigmatic I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), from the mystical A Canterbury Tale (1944) to the glorious ballet film The Red Shoes (1948), from the Children’s Foundation romp The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972) to the controversial shocker Peeping Tom (1960). But none of them are quite as beautiful and as exasperatingly inventive as A Matter of Life and Death, released in the States as Stairway to Heaven.
In the dying days of World War II, Squadron Leader Peter Carter (David Niven) is in trouble. His Lancaster bomber is aflame, his crew either dead or bailed out and he’s left in the flying wreckage without a parachute. As he faces his fate he strikes up a radio conversation with an American radio operator, June (Kim Hunter), flirting with her before leaping to his certain death over the English Channel. When he wakes he finds himself on a beach and assumes that he’s in the afterlife but it transpires that he’s still alive – he was supposed to have died but in the thick fog that shrouded the Channel that night he was missed by Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), the messenger sent to escort him to the afterlife 1. After meeting and falling in love with June, Peter refuses Conductor 71’s demands that he accompany him into the hereafter. June worries that Peter is seriously ill, especially as he keeps having terrible headaches and believes that he’s hallucinating his meetings with the Conductor. With the help of local doctor Reeves (Roger Livesey), who believes that Peter is suffering a brain injury, Peter undergoes surgery while at the same time standing trial in Heaven, defended by the deceased Reeves, fighting to be allowed to stay on Earth on the grounds that he would never have fallen in love had Conductor 71 not lost him in the fog.
You can pick holes in the plot all you like but you have to work extra hard to resist the considerable charms of A Matter of Life and Death. Powell and Pressburger opted for the unusual decision to film the earthly scenes in luminous Technicolor, beautifully shot by director of photography Jack Cardiff (his first gig with the Archers team), every frame bursting at the scenes with glorious hues and tones, and the scenes set in the afterlife in a chillier black and white (“One is starved for Technicolor up there” muses Conductor 71). Unusually, their vision of the afterlife is a monochrome bureaucracy, with no sign of God or any of the trappings of Christianity – there are no angels (we might construe the Conductor to be one but there’s no mention of gaining wings), no Heavenly choirs (just over-worked office staff) and notably when Peter appeals to a higher power, it’s to a court of law, albeit one on a vast scale.
The trial scene, it’s huge army of extras and gargantuan sets, is extraordinary, just one of the film’s many unforgettable set-pieces. Amid the massive scale of the proceedings there’s room for good-natured digs at the tediousness of cricket and the trashiness of 1940s era American popular music and the courtroom proceedings are unexpectedly electrifying, Livesy and Raymond Massey as the English-hating American prosecutor Abraham Farlan brilliantly verbally jousting back and forth.
The film is chock full of large scale spectacles. Take for example the breathtaking opening shot that zooms in from the depths of the universe where stars are exploding and galaxies forming to pick out the petty warring of the human race. the exact opposite of the opening of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), that other great film about celestial intervention in the lives of mortals, which opens with a pull back from Earth to the stars. There’s the vertiginous stairway of course (nicknamed “Ethel” by the cast and crew), the infinite escalator carrying Peter and the Conductor into the afterlife, a pull back at the end of the film that mirrors the opening zoom in and the immense scale of the trial where it’s suggested that millions have gathered to watch Peter’s fate being decided.
There are some lovely smaller touches too, particularly when Powell and Pressburger have fun playing with film itself – a table tennis match that freezes in mid-action as the Conductor returns, the point-of-view shot of an eyelid closing as Peter’s surgery gets under way, and surreal touches like the naked goatherd on the beach and Reeves the camera obscura which he uses to keep an eye on the villagers. It’s hard to imagine a film as strange as A Matter of Life and Death coming from post-war, traumatised UK – it truly gives the Hollywood spectaculars a run for their money and is on a scale rarely seen in British cinemas in the 1940s.
But it’s most affecting in its quieter, less flashy moments. In the opening sequences, Powell and Pressburger hold on close-ups of Niven and Hunter talking over the radio as Peter prepares for the end and stay with them throughout what should have been Peter’s last minutes. It’s a simple yet beautifully emotional moment seemingly crafted out of next to nothing, perfectly setting up the romance that’s to follow. And throughout, the directors (who also wrote the screenplay together) leave some wriggle room as to whether any of what we’re seeing should be taken at face value. Peter might just be losing it due to his brain injury and hallucinating everything. No-one else sees the supposedly Heavenly interventions (Reeves is dead by the time he appears in what could be Peter’s fantasies) and the trial is won when his surgeon – played by Abraham Sofaer who is also his judge in the afterlife – successfully completes his operation. That line of enquiry falls apart rather during early scenes of Flying Officer Trubshawe (Robert Coote), one of Peter’s crew, arriving to in the afterlife to find that his Squadron Leader is missing, a scene that doesn’t feature Peter, and the business about a book borrowed by the Conductor. Bu the script is ambiguous and leaves enough space to construct all sorts of scenarios in which the Heavenly scenes are just the fantasies of a traumatised brain.
The performances are great, every single one of them spot on. Niven, the suavest and most charming of English actors, had never been this suave or charming; the then unknown Hunter (later Dr Zira in the first three Planet of the Apes films) is saddled with the rather thankless romantic foil; to Niven but plays it so captivatingly that it’s not hard to see why Peter falls for June sight unseen; Livesey, a Powell and Pressburger regular, comes close to stealing the show as the likeable Dr Reeves; but the proceedings are well and truly purloined by Marius Goring as the effete French Conductor 71 (Goring had wanted to play Peter but Powell and Pressburger had their hearts set on Niven) with a love of chess and flowery phrases and plentiful ruminations on the power of love.
The American supporting cast (which includes Bonar Colleano, Robert Arden, Robert Beatty and Tommy Duggan) are frequently hilarious and very game, nevermore so than in the A Midsummer Night’s Dream rehearsals where the vicar (Robert Atkins) admonishes them for their New York accents (“Bottom’s not a gangster,” he quips, a pop shot at William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt’s 1935 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which starred frequent gangster movie star James Cagney as Shakespeare’s comic weaver).
A Matter of Life and Death was originally conceived as a work of propaganda, an ode to the friendship between the USA and the UK (it was released in the same year that Churchill coined the phrase “special relationship”). But above all else, it turns out to be a hymn to the power of love – the love not only between Peter and June but Powell and Pressburger’s love of film and the power it gave them to transcend mundane everyday reality. The film is is conducting its own romance, with film itself, with the possibilities that cinema can offer to transport us into worlds that we could hitherto only imagine. This would have been especially appreciated by a British public still reeling from the five years of the Second World War and no doubt thankful for any escape from the harshness of post-War reconstruction they could find.
After becoming the first film shown at a Royal Film Performance on 1 November 1946 at the Empire Theatre, in London A Matter of Life and Death went on to enjoy considerable success at the box office. It’s stature has only grown over the years, finding itself at number 20 in the British Film Institute’s 1999 list of Best 100 British films, just one of the many “best of” lists that it’s found itself gracing since. It was adapted for American radio twice, both as Stairway to Heaven and both broadcast in the Lux Radio Theatre slot with Ray Milland playing Peter Carter on 27 October 1947 and Niven reprising the role on 12 April 1955. Between the two, NBC’s Screen Director’s Playhouse did their own version on 26 July 1951 with Robert Cummings and Julie Adams taking the lead roles and that same year a small screen adaptation was staged as part of the American Robert Montgomery Presents series starring Richard Greene. There was also a musical theatrical version staged at the King’s Head in Islington, London in November 1994 and a more straightforward adaptation was mounted at the National Theatre in London in May 2007 by the Kneehigh Theatre group.
Endlessly inventive, witty and a thrilling feast for the senses, it’s not hard to see why it’s still so beloved by so many. Beautifully shot by Cardiff, whose camera roams around the sets, pans hectically back and forth during the table tennis, and always takes the unlikely angle and underscored by a wonderful Allan Gray soundtrack it looks and sounds as good today as it did in 1946. Its sentiments might seem simplistic today but they still resonate. If they don’t, distract yourself ticking off the film’s many literary allusions (The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan, the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream among them), marvelling at the incredible special effects and wondering just how a film as strange as A Matter of Life and Death could have emerged from the British film industry at all, let alone at a time when the country was still feeling the effects of the most devastating war in human history.
- The film is careful not to ever refer to this other world as Heaven. In an early scene an overawed British airman (played by Richard Attenborough) arrives in the extraordinary reception hall and sighs “it’s Heaven isn’t it?” but gets no reply from the “Chief Recorder” (Joan Maude). ↩
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