Review by Philip French
Film Critic: The Guardian
Sunday March 26, 2000
One of the finest products of the partnership between Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger, it is an extravagant allegory that
manages to be simultaneously life-enhancing and necrophiliac.
First shown in late 1946, the re-released A Matter of Life and Death, one
of the finest products of the partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger, is an extravagant allegory that manages to be simultaneously
life-enhancing and necrophiliac. David Niven is at his most charming as
a wounded RAF pilot who on the point of death confronts a heavenly tribunal.
The themes are Anglo-American relations, imperialism and the shape of the
post-war world, and the movie is dated only in the sense that it exudes
that spirit of hope that informed the brief period between the election
of the
first majority Labour Government and the onset of the Cold War.
Kim Hunter, who the following year was to create the role of Stella in A
Streetcar Named Desire, is delightful as the American WAC devoted to Niven,
and there is a scene-stealing performance from Marius Goring as the
eighteenth-century French aristocrat, a victim of the Revolution, who acts
as a heavenly emissary. Jack Cardiff's photography (monochrome for heaven,
Technicolor for Earth) and Alfred Junge's sets are exquisite.
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