TV Guide review
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
aka Stairway to Heaven
A delightful and exquisitely photographed fantasy about an RAF pilot, Niven,
who is forced to bail out of his flaming plane as it is dropping out of
the sky. With all his fellow crew members either dead or having parachuted
to safety and his own chute riddled with bullet holes, Niven gets on the
radio and shares what he believes to be his last words with an American
WAC, Hunter. Niven, a poet, has a romantic conversation with Hunter and
falls hopelessly in love with her voice. When he finally jumps for his life,
he lands in the ocean and is washed safely ashore. By some fateful coincidence
he meets Hunter and the pair fall in love. Although Niven appears to be
healthy, he actually is suffering from brain damage and must undergo an
operation. Meanwhile, in heaven (photographed in dye-monochrome, while the
real world is in Technicolor), it is realized that a terrible mistake has
been made, that Niven, who was scheduled to die, has somehow lived. This
discovery is made by Heavenly Conductor Number 71, Goring, a Frenchman who
was beheaded in his country's revolution. While Goring and his superiors
debate Niven's fate, Niven argues that because of their mistake and because
he has fallen in love with Hunter, he should be allowed to remain on Earth.
While Niven lies on the operating table, his appeal is heard by a group
of heavenly judges led by prosecutor Massey, an American with strong anti-British
sentiments, since he was the first colonial fighter killed in the American
Revolution. Niven finally wins his case, emerges from a successful operation,
and is reunited with sweetheart Hunter.
A fantastic accomplishment which shines with surrealistic cinematic bravura,
Stairway to Heaven is a marvel of technique and imagination created
by the collective minds of Powell and Pressburger, with a notable contribution
from production designer Junge. Most remarkable is his monumental stairway
which reaches majestically into the heavens and is peopled with a cast of
history's dead. Chosen as the first of the Royal Film Performances,
Stairway to Heaven garnered some critical acclaim in Britain but
was generally attacked by stuffy detractors who felt it was anti-British
(once again proving that the greatest harm inflicted on the always unstable
British cinema is that imposed by British critics themselves, who prefer
to cut down their finest directors, namely Powell and Pressburger, rather
than build them up. In America, it was met with great enthusiasm and compared,
somewhat unfairly, to the 1941 Robert Montgomery vehicle Here Comes Mr.
Jordan, which was remade in 1978 as Heaven Can Wait. An immensely
enjoyable piece of escapist entertainment, though not without important
underlying themes, which only improves with age.
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