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. Continue reading “Rapid Response: A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)”
