A matter of joy and bliss
Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian: Friday March 24, 2000
A world war two pilot (David Niven) miraculously escapes death after
baling out of a burning plane. A celestial court is set up to judge his
case while Niven hangs in limbo between a Technicolour earth and a
monochrome heaven.
The BFI has produced a ravishing new print of Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger's 1946 fairy tale A Matter of Life and Death, and it
is a real, or rather surreal treat. This is the fable of a British airman
Peter Carter (David Niven), who falls in love while in radio contact with
an American air controller June (Kim Hunter) as he plunges to certain death
in his blazing Lancaster bomber in 1945. A clerical mistake in heaven means
he is miraculously allowed to live and meet up, passionately, with June
- and is then called to a kind of celestial Supreme Court to plead the merits
of his earthly love, versus the duty of submitting to the commands of the
next world.
The debate assumes the proportions of a good-natured Special Relationship
grudge match, as the prosecution's case is argued by a wig-and-knicker rebel
colonist of 1776 who says that this effete Englishman has no business trifling
with the affections of a good Boston girl. The heavenly trial is attended
by many nations, mainly of the empire.
When the seats are filled for this colossal event you can see where George
Lucas got his inspiration for the senatorial debates in The Phantom Menace.
There is extraordinary freshness to this film, a bloom of sanguine innocence
and fantasy - in spite of, or perhaps directly because of the fact that
the grim realities of the second world war were hardly a distant memory
in 1946. (Did audiences worry then about the lack of Germans in heaven,
in or out of uniform?) The entire opening sequence, from the omniscient
tour through an amiable, benevolent universe to the drama of Niven's flaming
plane is bravura film-making. Jack Cardiff's Oscar-winning cinematography
[Jack didn't get the Oscar for this one. In fact it didn't even get any
nominations !!]
is beautifully composed and Alfred Junge's magnificent designs for the vast
heavenly stairway, the filing-room for admitted souls and the gigantic amphitheatre
are still breathtaking.
It is a film with incredible self-possession, at once a playful miniature
of innocent love and grandiose epic. The scene in which Niven chances across
a naked goatherd on a beach is unmissably weird: what ludic genius was there
in Powell and Pressburger's joint creative mind to create that bizarre Hellenic
moment? It is a must-see film, if only to gaze at Kathleen Byron - here
playing a severe angel - one of the most beautiful, elegant and charismatic
women in British screen history.
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