Classics: 'A Matter of Life and Death' (1946)

A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)
104 minutes, PG, UK
Release Date   December 25, 1946
Distributor   Universal Pictures
Directors   Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Written by   Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Producers   Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Music   Allan Gray
Cinematography   Jack Cardiff
Editing   Reginald Mills
Production Design   Alfred Junge
Special Effects   Henry Harris and Douglas Woolsey
Cast   David Niven, Kim Hunter, Robert Coote, Kathleen Byron, Richard Attenborough, Bonor Colleano, Joan Maude, Marius Goring, Roger Livesey, Robert Atkins, Bob Roberts, Edwin Max, Betty Potter, Abraham Sofaer, Raymond Massey

You’re sucked in to A Matter of Life and Death (or Stairway to Heaven, as it was known by its American title) before the end of the opening credits, which are etched into an impossibly blue background that soon segues into the lush expanse of the cosmos. Stars and planets shimmer in this animated effects shot, which pans across infinity until it finally alights on earth and dissolves into the story proper. Over this fantastic first shot, the words of a narrator can be heard: “This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?” One of the overwhelming feats that the movie accomplishes is that it convinces us of both the universe’s immensity and of individual humans’ significant role in it: there may be an infinity of things we don’t know, questions we’ll never be able to answer, principles of reality we’re not even minutely aware of, but that doesn’t make us less important in the grand scheme of things. In a particularly romantic and extravagant mood, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger convince us that the universe would stop functioning if humanity was relentlessly violent and murderous towards one another; that, in other words, it’s humanly love that keeps the wheels of heaven and the cosmos rolling—a nakedly sentimental lesson that aches with the sense of urgency bestowed by World War II (A Matter of Life and Death was released in 1946).

If you’re engrossed in A Matter of Life and Death by the end of the second minute, you’re completely entranced by it before the end of the fifth, and maybe around the fifteenth or so you’re bowled over, speechless, enamored. How could you not be? Technicolor has never seemed to pop as much as in Jack Cardiff’s cinematography for Powell and Pressburger films, and of those, never as much as it does here. The oranges and yellows of a burning wreck, the greens of an idyllic garden, the deep red of Kim Hunter’s lipstick—they’re all impossibly lush, as though the color is throbbing, realer than reality. (Here is a movie that incontrovertibly disproves the theory that the more fantastic is a film’s premise, the less immersive that movie’s evocation of reality will be.) The vibrancy of the colors is accentuated because half of the film—the half set in heaven—is shot in silky black-and-white, while all the earthbound scenes dazzle with their color. (The color process is even mentioned by name in one surprisingly self-reflexive line of dialogue, as an angel laments the lack of Technicolor in the heavens.) The color scheme is clever and exquisitely done (every dissolve from black-and-white to color will likely leave you awestruck), but it also perfectly complements what the movie’s about: between eternal heaven and an earthly life in which you’ve found true love, the more magical, hopeful, and blissful of the two worlds is undeniably the latter.

That’s the key to the lasting appeal of Powell and Pressburger’s films: technically masterful though they are, they impress most of all because of their aching humanity, the intense empathy with which they view their characters. At times the vivid emotionalism of their stories, their larger-than-life dramas, can date awkwardly, as they do with Black Narcissus's repressed nuns or The Red Shoes' non-ballet sequences. A Matter of Life and Death, though, carries out a sublime balancing act: as technically innovative as it is achingly sincere, it's the work of humanists as well as stylists.

The movie is about a cosmic oversight: RAF pilot Peter Carter is supposed to die. We meet him at the tail end of a failed air strike sometime during World War II, desperately trying to radio back to land while his wrecked aircraft struggles to remain in the air. He contacts an American radio operator named June and, improbably (but charmingly), they fall in love over the airwaves. Carter quotes classical poetry to her before he leaps from his plane without a parachute—here's a movie so stylized and so unabashedly romantic that quoting Marvell and Sir Walter Raleigh doesn't seem out of place.

Carter is scheduled to die on this night, but he doesn't: the heavenly transporter assigned to retrieve him cannot see him through the dense fog (occasioning a wry joke about typical British weather). So Carter washes ashore and almost immediately finds June bicycling down the beach, a coincidence that would seem contrived if the movie wasn't already operating on such a cosmically-charmed, magically-predestined wavelength. We cut from the gorgeous Technicolor greenery on earth to the black-and-white (though opulently stylized) bureaucracy in heaven, where the angelic transporter responsible for Carter is being reprimanded for his mistake. He's called Conductor 71, but apparently was a French aristocrat beheaded during the Reign of Terror.

Sent back to earth to reclaim Carter's soul, Conductor 71 freezes time as Carter and June canoodle in the forest (the kind dotted with impossibly bright colors) and tries to convince Carter to cede himself to the heavens, thus righting the cosmic balance. Carter unsurprisingly refuses and proposes a trial: he will defend himself in a heavenly court, using June's and his own love as evidence, and argue for the right to continue living.

As usual in fantastic stories like this, we have a parallel storyline that could propose a rational explanation: June suspects that Carter's visions are hallucinations brought on by brain trauma, and enlists the help of her friend, Doctor Reeves, in diagnosing him. The relationship between Reeves and Carter is fascinating to watch, a burgeoning friendship built out of mutual respect and a reckoning with unexplainable laws of the universe that they can't hope to fathom. (David Niven and Roger Livesey, as Carter and Reeves respectively, make their friendship a moving one; neither actor has ever given as sensitive a performance as they do here.) Reeves believes that Carter's hallucinations and faltering health are the result of a concussion, the effects of which may be alleviated by brain surgery. The entire climax of Carter's heavenly trial, then, may be nothing more than Carter's own anesthetized brink-of-death vision, a parallel fantasy in which he's allowed to plead for the right to go on living.

Released in the immediate aftermath of World War II, A Matter of Life and Death's impassioned plea for love and brotherhood is honest, direct. The movie tells us, adamantly and sweetly, that love is its own heaven on earth—preferable, in any case, to the legions of G.I.s that we see filling the heavens in A Matter of Life and Death. The message seems less cloying when we consider it as a desperately hopeful response to the ravages of war.

A Matter of Life and Death's cosmic courtroom

Late in the film, a showdown occurs during Carter's heavenly trial between the prosecutor—an American named Abraham Farlan, who was killed by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War—and Carter's British defense counsel, a semi-major character whose death I won't give away here. A surprisingly long sequence (maybe fifteen minutes in all) consists of their proud, vitriolic back-and-forth, a dialogue reflecting fraught British-US tensions at the time. (After the war, much of the British public was resentful of the lingering presence of US soldiers in some of their cities.) The debate turns increasingly towards the merits and injustices of each respective culture—even a dull British cricket match and a grating American pop tune are used as detrimental “evidence” against each other. The argument goes deeper, addressing values, crimes against humanity—slavery, the exploitation of foreign cultures, invasion. An all-American jury is eventually proposed to act as demonstration of the country's sense of justice and honor—a jury that contains a multicultural assortment of Americans, reflecting both a nod to American “melting pot” eclecticism and a criticism of the United States' takeover of cultures. (An all-black regiment of the American army seated in the audience at this heavenly trial—as well as the appearance of numerous slaves in heaven—offer potent visual illustrations of American racial inequality.) For a long stretch, the movie turns away from Carter altogether, instead focusing on British-American antagonism. The move at first seems bold and disorienting, and definitely adds unexpected folds into the fabric of the narrative, but really the whole film could be described as “about” British-American relations—considering that June is British and Carter American. In the end, then, the love between June and Carter offers a union between both the man and the woman and between the US and the UK—hopeful in every way. While the lengthy dialogue between the American and British counsellors come off as slightly didactic or transparent, this should be seen as an admirably direct and earnest address to the audience—propaganda, in a way, but with the most beneficial aims in mind. Like Chaplin's climactic speech in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), we're directly asked to consider war a massive injustice, an inhumane crime committed by states against multitudes of citizens; the speeches in both films may be didactic, but only because war is the catalyst and social dialogue the aim.

A Matter of Life and Death fascinates beyond its sociopolitical subtext. It seems to hit upon a new idea suddenly, in the middle of a scene, yet somehow incorporate it naturally into the movie as a whole. We are introduced to Dr. Reeves as he is operating a camera obscura in his attic, essentially allowing him a godlike reflection of everything going on in his village in the immediate vicinity. The images his camera obscura offers us are gorgeous, fuzzy, dreamlike—Dr. Reeves' elaborate mirror setup acts as a parallel to the film camera, offering us visual access to worlds we otherwise would not know. This brief introduction to Dr. Reeves doesn't seem to have much of a point beyond allowing Powell (who typically addressed the directing duties, as Pressburger concentrated on the screenplay) and Jack Cardiff an excuse to experiment with perspective and framing and indulge in their visual inclinations. But it also seems like a natural diversion somehow, and warmly suggests Dr. Reeves as an inquisitive, playful, enthusiastic innovator—a scientist who stands in contrast to Carter's flights of fancy. Or, later, consider a brief cutaway to a group of British soldiers rehearsing a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream—a moment partially played for comedy, but also an appropriate allusion for a film that's somewhat about the knotty relationship between gods and mortals. In short, the movie is lively, intuitive, and incredibly fast-paced, fascinating for the unexpected directions in which the agile narrative takes us.

The special effects are rightfully celebrated as some of the most innovative and beautiful of the time (or ever), and there's no question that the vast expanse of the heavens—the seemingly endless staircase, flanked by immense statues, that stretches into infinity; the massive courtroom, a sort of floating coliseum, somehow surrounded by blankets of wispy clouds and shimmering sky—are astonishing in their vastness, their meticulousness. The sets themselves are elaborate blends of matte paintings, models, and enormous locales with seemingly hundreds of extras—a fantastic visualization of an impossibly beautiful heaven. (Heaven in this movie seems remarkably like our typical image of the afterlife from fables and myths—which makes you wonder if its portrayal in the movie reflected popular culture's conception of heaven or if it helped to entrench it in our cultural collective.) The most awe-inspiring shot in the whole movie begins in Technicolor in an emergency room, tilts down and slowly dissolves into a serious of bubbles erupting in liquid, dazzling in color (an influence for the opening of Kwaidan?), until the image dissolves to black-and-white, tilting further down over the milky, cloudy expanse of heaven to introduce us to the first image of the courtroom—an endpoint that is an immense composition in itself.

But A Matter of Life and Death is also a “movie movie”—meaning its splendor, its unique power, can't be encapsulated by words. It's the kind of thing you have to see to believe, an appraisal which, I would suggest, is appropriate for all masterful cinema. The foregoing paragraphs have not, I'm sure, come close to the bewildering effect of this movie's stunning color or precise compositions, or the bleeding sincerity, the charming rosy-eyed optimism, that it offers.