Submitted by
Nick Garrett
Stairway to Heaven
104 mins
Variety
Like other Powell and Pressburger pictures, the striving to appear intellectual is much
too apparent. Less desire to exhibit alleged learning, and more humanity
would have resulted in a more popular offering.
For the first ten minutes, apart from some pretentious poppycock, the
picture looks like living up to its boosting. This is real cinema, then
action gives way to talk, some of it flat and dreary. Stroy is set in this
world (graced with technicolor) and the Other World (relegated to dye
monochrome) as it exists in the mind of an airman whose imagination has been
affected by concussion.
Returning from a bomber expedition, Squadron Leader David Niven is shot up.
Last of the crew, minus a parachute, and believing the end is inevitable,
before bailing out talks poetry and love over the radio to Kim Hunter,
American WAC on nearby air station. Miraculously Niven falls into the sea,
is washed ashore apparently unhurt, and by strange coincidence meets Kim.
They fall desperately in love. Meanwhile in the other world there's much
bother. Owing to deliquency of heavenly conductor Marius Goring, Niven has
failed to check in and Goring is despatched to this world to persuade Niven
to take his rightful place and balance the heavenly books.
Obviously experimental in many respects, the designs for the other world are
a matter of taste, but with all their ingenuity Powell, Pressburger and
Alfred Junge could only invent a heaven remeniscent of the Hollywood Bowl
and and an exculsive celestial nighclub where hostesses dish out wings to
dead pilots.
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