Classic Movie Review: A Matter of Life and Death
By Josh Spiegel
March 23, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Both of them are fantasizing about Taylor Lautner.
Every once in a while, we sit in awe as greatness unfolds around us. When it comes to movies, we're lucky if it happens more than once a year. Even with the movies that are hailed as the best of the year, not all of them are thought of as fondly 20 years after the fact. Rain Man was used as a pop culture touchstone in The Hangover, but as a Best Picture winner, are we still as in love with it as we once were? True classics are hard to find. And, as anyone who's read this column over the past year knows, even those movies we all consider to be among the classic films of the past century don't hold up to the light of day. So, when you're watching a movie go forward, and you become aware of its potential, you have to sit up and pay attention.

I'm not sure what it is that makes Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the two men who were known as The Archers, such sure-handed filmmakers. They managed, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, to create some of the best films and tell the best stories that have existed in the era of cinema. The crime here is obvious. See, more than likely, you, the reader, fall under one of the following scenarios: a) you have never heard of Powell or Pressburger, b) you've only heard of Powell, and c) you've probably never seen any of their movies. Some people have, but even with the effusiveness that comes forth from such great American filmmakers as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, it's not enough. We know directors like Alfred Hitchcock. We should also know The Archers.

Back in August of 2009, I reviewed, for this column, the 1943 Archers film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and mentioned that I was looking forward to get to know further the filmography of these two talented gentlemen. Obviously, I've done so in the interim. By this point, I've come to see their most fruitful efforts (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes) to be as consistently and consecutively amazing a run of movies as Hitchcock's movies during the late 1950s (including Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest). Unfortunately, the British film industry has never been as widely embraced in the States. Though Hitchcock was British, you'll notice that the majority of his success came across the pond.

What's more, Powell ended up killing his career, post-Archers, with the 1960 horror film Peeping Tom. Of course, it turns out that Peeping Tom is just as excellent a film as anything he did with Pressburger, but the British press and audience wasn't as ready for an equally groundbreaking look at voyeurism as Americans were the same year with Psycho, directed by (yep, him again) Alfred Hitchcock. Anyway, thanks to Scorsese, Coppola, and various historians in both countries and elsewhere, the Powell-Pressburger canon lives on, mostly available on DVD from Criterion, and on Netflix Watch Instantly. One of the few films from The Archers that isn't available with Netflix Watch Instantly is the aforementioned A Matter of Life and Death, the movie highlighted this week.

So, what of A Matter of Life and Death? This wartime romantic fantasy, released in 1946 and a film with the unique privilege of being the first ever Royal Film Performance (meaning that the royal family of England, not as seemingly irrelevant then as they may be now, saw the film first, elevating its status instantly), provides that inexplicable feeling, the knowledge that you're in the throes of a great movie. I'll go further: I'll wager that A Matter of Life and Death is one of the most assured, most charming, most entertaining movies I've ever seen. The irony, as always, is that you probably haven't seen the movie (and if you have, you know what I'm talking about, in terms of the many delights the movie has to offer). If I haven't convinced you to see the movie by the time you're done with this review, I'm not sure what can be done for your film-going knowledge.

In general, though, it's taken me 25 years and change to come to the realization that there may be no greater pleasure in the life of the filmgoer than to watch a film from the Archers. What impresses me most about their films, this one included, is that these are the movies that people should think of when lamenting why filmmakers don't make movies the way they used to. A Matter of Life and Death did not break the mold; it is the mold. This is the movie that epitomizes what defines classic filmmaking. The stylistic flourishes Powell and Pressburger devise are present in all aspects, and yet are never in-your-face choices. What's most impressive here is that A Matter of Life and Death could easily have suffered from an overwhelming amount of whimsy, but it always skirts the line well.

The movie opens with a tense and somehow sweet sequence in which the two main characters meet cute, as Roger Ebert would put it, in the most unlikely situation: the female lead is June, a cheery and cute radio operator from Boston working in Britain during World War II. The male lead is Peter, a Royal Air Force squadron leader who expects to be dead in about five minutes. His plane has been shot at, all but one of the squadron have parachuted to safety, the other man is dead, and his parachute is shot to pieces. Before Peter jumps out of the plane (as he'd prefer not to blow up), he talks with June and, crazily enough, falls in love, even if it's just with a disembodied voice. Still, the time comes for him to jump, and he does so, expecting the worst with a stiff upper lip.

And then a funny thing happens. Peter wakes up. On the shore of the beach he jumped onto. Alive and unharmed. What's more, Peter has landed in the same place where June lives during her time in the war; with a new lease on life, he runs to her and they begin their affair in earnest. The question of mortality ending has, for Peter, ended temporarily, but is just beginning for his celestial conductor, a fop from the French Revolution who was meant to claim Peter's body for death as he jumped out of his plane. Thanks to all the fog permeating the English highlands, though, he missed Peter and has to reclaim the man for death. Peter, though, chooses to appeal with the highest court of all, so he may continue to live with June, who he's now head-over-heels for. Thus, all that's left to wonder is if Peter and June will make off or not (take a wild guess).

What makes A Matter of Life and Death so charming, so livable, and so enviable to anyone with a mind to make movies is not just the script, full of humor and life, but the actors, all of whom seem to so embody their characters that you wonder how they can do so much with seemingly so little. David Niven, future Oscar winner, plays Peter as a smart and dashing rogue, a man troubled by what appear to be realistic hallucinations in the form of his conductor, but not too troubled to ask for some tea or watch a game of ping-pong. Kim Hunter, another future Oscar winner, plays June, the personification of the phrase "cute as a button". What red-blooded man wouldn't want to move heaven and earth to live out a second life with her? Their chemistry, while never reaching the erotic peaks attained in the next film from the Archers, Black Narcissus, is still white-hot.

In a winning and unique performance as Dr. Reeves, the man who ends up being Peter's worldly and ethereal counsel, is Roger Livesey, the same man who played Colonel Blimp. Here, he doesn't age, but his wit, his smarts, and his camera obscura, a device which allows him to see all in his village, if from a darkened vantage point, make the character as instantly iconic as Blimp or Thomas Colpeper from A Canterbury Tale. Other notable performances come from Marius Goring, as the French conductor; and Raymond Massey as the prosecuting counsel for the case of Peter's life, a true American patriot felled by the first bullet of the American Revolution who, for obvious reasons, despises all things British.

One of the many flourishes that stick out here is the literal stairway to Heaven (though, cleverly, Powell and Pressburger never come out and call the place where the dead go Heaven), a massive moving platform that heads up endlessly into the clouds. The production design, in general, is fantastic, managing to seem expansive and epic even if the story is decidedly meant to seem unpretentious and uninterested in broadening the scope. As is always the case with films from The Archers, the story never seems contrived (even if you're asked early on to suspend your disbelief), and never seems like something you've seen before.

Jack Cardiff's cinematography, mixing Technicolor during the scenes set on Earth and black-and-white during the Heaven-set sequences, is splendid and stunning. Here was a man who knew how to make the world come alive, color or not. One of the most haunting shots of the film comes early and is set in Heaven, as some of the recent dead peer down through large holes, with the camera facing towards them. Still, the color photography is as lush as anything he ever put on screen, rivaling his work in The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. His work with Powell and Pressburger is, no surprise, second to none.

I realize that I'm late to this party; frankly, if it wasn't for the diligent and tireless work done by Martin Scorsese, and the mention of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp courtesy of Roger Ebert in his Great Movies column, I don't know if I'd know much about Powell and Pressburger. That said, I've discovered their films and am happier for doing so. The stories they tell are fully lived in. Without seeming like they're working to do so, these two men built characters, towns, lives, worlds. From fantasy to fable, the war to the ballet, the smallest aspect of nature to the biggest question a person could ever have, the Archers set their sights high, and often hit their targets directly, as evidenced in their logo. A Matter of Life and Death is one of their finest efforts, if not their best, and a movie that you must see as soon as you can.