Classic Movie Review: A Matter of Life and Death

By Josh Spiegel

March 23, 2010

Both of them are fantasizing about Taylor Lautner.

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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.




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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.


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