One of the best shots in “A Matter of Life and Death” is a deep focus image of Peter Carter (David Niven) sleeping in a chair while through a window we can clearly see his girlfriend June (Kim Hunter) and his doctor Frank Reeves (Roger Livesay) playing an innocent game of table tennis. The shot has a visual poetry and at once takes place in two distinct worlds.
Such is the nature of “A Matter of Life and Death,” a deep, profound, intelligent and thought provoking film on fate vs. free will that, unlike many films with similar themes, is blissfully playful and fun.
On the new critics’ Sight and Sound Poll, “A Matter of Life and Death” is tied for 90th place, the highest of any Powell and Pressburger film and just ahead of a movie with a similar subject but a very different tone, “The Seventh Seal.”
We meet Peter Carter mid-air on a crashing bomber plane during World War II, and just before he jumps out of the burning plane with no parachute, he spends his last few minutes talking to the on-the-ground operative June, quickly showing himself to be a man with poetry and love in his heart to a woman who can’t help but show compassion and concern.
The film switches to black and white, and we’re in a pristine, geometrically perfect place we quickly realize is heaven. Soldiers come up an escalator with expressions of insouciance as they explain their death, forlornness as one plays a harmonica coming up the stairs, confusion as one soldier searches this place aimlessly, and excitement as a flock of soldiers run upstairs together and start flirting with the angel secretary. It turns out that Peter was supposed to show up here, but his grim reaper, a French fop who blames the silly English weather and fog, caused him to miss. (“Sorry. I… lost my head”) But now that he’s fallen in love with June and has survived, he feels entitled to keep a hold of his life and appeals to the high court of heaven that love should supersede the law of death.
It’s a wonderful story that works like a charm, and its made all the more delightful by its vibrant visual palette. The Technicolor in Powell and Pressburger movies (see: “The Red Shoes”) always seems to pop more than even most films today, and here the look is used to depict Heaven as the sterile, ordered universe and Earth as the otherworldly place of love, magic and possibility. “One is starved for Technicolor up there,” says the grim reaper in a gem of a fourth wall breaking moment.
Powell’s camera and Pressburger’s editing have a sort of visual poetry and musical quality. Watch a scene where Doctor Reeves has built a lens to overlook the town. The room is completely dark and the scene is lit such that dogs and people pop in front of a blackened infinity backdrop. The scene’s unnatural aesthetic even lends the next shot framed inside a doorway a sort of storybook quality. It’s all quite lovely.
Unfortunately I became somewhat disenchanted with the ending. Doctor Reeves serves as Peter’s counsel in a court case on his life, and the film transforms into something about culture rather than fate or human nature. A patriot American killed in 1775 leads the charge on Peter and all the British, and it feels dated with antiquated ideas about American idealism and wartime romance. It has to confirm to us that it is possible that a Brit and an American could in fact fall in love under such circumstances, and then it has to remind us that America is a melting pot. The jury selected is a group of worldly people who all have prejudices to England (although ask all of them what they think of America today), and they’re replaced with American counterparts portrayed by the same actors.
Even the end loses some of its poetic elegance. While standing on the giant stairway to heaven (the film’s new title), which is one of the finest sets constructed in Old Hollywood, the film spends so much time waxing on and on about the ideas of love and not about the guiding principles that opened the film.
Regardless, it’s a delightful film of great joy and visual splendor.