A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
Prop… or wings? Prop… or wings? We celebrate this afterlife classic. Pure cinema heaven.
MET WITH MIXED REVIEWS, MICHAEL POWELL AND EMERIC PRESSBURGER’S SUBLIME ROMANTIC FANTASY IS NOW CONSIDERED ONE OF THE GREATS OF BRITISH CINEMA. STEVE O’BRIEN CLIMBS THE STAIRWAY TO MOVIE HEAVEN…
t began with a request. “Can’t you two fellows think up a good idea to improve anglo-american relations?”
the year was 1944 and the man asking was Jack beddington, the head of film at the Ministry of information, a mercifully impermanent department set up by the british government in the early days of wwii to disseminate uplifting propaganda for the war-weary masses. and those “two fellows”? that’d be Michael Powell and emeric Pressburger, a writing-directing partnership who had, since 1939, been the authors of some of british cinema’s most idiosyncratic treasures.
“what’s wrong?” asked Powell, “are we not winning the war?”
“Oh, that’s just the trouble,” beddington replied. “when we were losing, everyone loved each other, but now we’re actually winning…”
beddington knew the pair’s work well enough not to expect something tediously didactic. but even he couldn’t have foreseen quite how deliciously subversive, strange and poetic Powell and Pressburger’s film would be, as they set about crafting a dashingly flamboyant fantasia that would stand as one of this island’s greatest, and most quintessential, big-screen triumphs.
it starts with stars. “this is the universe… big, isn’t it?” intones an unnamed narrator, before the camera escorts us gently to earth. it’s the 2nd of May 1945 and squadron Leader Peter Carter (David niven) is on board an incurably damaged Lancaster bomber and facing certain death when he makes contact with an american radio operator named June (a pre-Planet Of The Apes Kim hunter). he says his final goodbyes and, parachute-less, jumps from the plane. Yet somehow, miraculously, he survives... but should he be dead? the movie whisks us to what looks like heaven, a stark, monochromatic afterlife, where bureaucratic functionaries usher through the freshly dead (no germans though, it seems). there’s been an oversight, a clerical error, and Peter isn’t where he’s supposed to be. but now he’s found love with June, Carter isn’t prepared to bite the big one and launches an appeal, the result of which will decide whether he will live or die...
wings of desire
the movie makes it clear up front that we’re not to swallow these flights of celestial flavoured fantasy. “this is a story of two worlds,” a caption reads after the opening credits, “the one we know and another which exists only in the mind of a young airman whose life and imagination have been violently shaped by war.”
that a man could hurl himself from an aeroplane without a ’chute and live may seem fanciful, yet the germ of the idea for A Matter Of Life And Death came from a newspaper report of a british rear gunner who had fallen 18,000 feet into a snow drift and had, amazingly, survived. From that tall tale acorn, emeric Pressburger began blueprinting A Matter Of Life And Death, before passing his finished script to Powell who performed his customary rewrite, layering in all the medical and scientific specifics that explain away Carter’s intricately detailed hallucinations.
Like Peter Carter, David niven had fought in the war, but as a lieutenant in the rifle brigade, not the raF. his first job after military service was a Carol reed-directed war drama titled The Way Ahead. Powell and Pressburger had caught that movie and, after briefly considering stewart granger, set their sights on the raffish niven as their lovestruck hero. “we saw, for the first time, the real David niven,” Powell would recall, “shrewd, kind, quick-witted and full of fantasy, the image of our hero Peter.”
Powell and Pressburger wasted little time in populating the film with their favourite go-tos. roger Livesey, who’d played the title role in 1943’s The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, signed on as the pragmatic local doctor, Frank reeves, while Marius goring, who’d appeared as a u-boat officer in their 1939 thriller The Spy
In Black, was given the showy role of the foppish French aristo dispatched from heaven to retrieve the undead pilot.
Casting british actors would prove easy. with eight films to their joint credit, the two directors knew their own country’s (or adopted country, in Pressburger’s case) talent base like their own gardens, but when it came to finding their american star, the pair were on shakier casting ground. Powell had mulled asking broadway actor betty Field, but decided, after she glided past the director without even a “hello”, that perhaps she wasn’t his June. “i often wonder what would have happened if Miss Field had given me a smile or handed me a flower… instead of giving me that sour broadway rat-race look,” Powell said later.
while in america, the pair had hooked up with alfred hitchcock and his wife alma who, a few days before, had filmed some screen tests with up-and-coming female actors. “there was a girl in that test who may very well be the girl you are looking for,” hitch told them, adding: “sensible, pretty, could be the girl next door, can act, good voice, good legs.”
that girl was Kim hunter, a 23-year-old who’d only been hired for the tests to feed lines to one of the other actors, another fresh-faced neophyte by the name of ingrid bergman. “is she Californian?” Powell asked. “no,” replied alma, “she’s a lady.” although the script for A Matter Of Life And
Death was finished and locked in 1944, Powell and Pressburger weren’t able to start lensing for nearly a year. Despite the movie’s status as a high-priority propaganda piece, they still had to wait in line for the technicolor film stock and equipment to become available, both being strictly rationed during the war. never ones to sit idly, they chose to dive into production on another film in the meantime, the black-andwhite romantic drama I Know Where I’m
Going, until the time was ready.
heaven sent
although the idea of A Matter Of Life And
Death was conceived in wartime, the movie itself was born in peacetime, with filming commencing on 14 august 1945, the day Japan surrendered. Perhaps the boldest decision Powell and Pressburger made in the movie’s development was in making it both in colour
and black-and-white. that in itself wasn’t such a revolutionary move – The Wizard Of Oz had, six years earlier, painted Dorothy’s imaginary world in a rainbow of primary colours and her home life in Kansas in blacks and whites, but P&P, almost counterintuitively, inverted that film’s colour scheme logic, depicting the real world through the hyper glow of technicolor and Peter’s surreal visions of the afterlife in pearly monochrome. the message seemed to be that it’s earthly life that is wondrous, not the sterile nothingness of the next world. “One is
starved of technicolor up there,” quips Marius goring’s Conductor 71 as he arrives on earth in one of the movie’s most slyly meta moments.
For the role of cinematographer, P&P picked a young camera operator by the name of Jack Cardiff. the 31-year-old was, in Powell’s words, “technicolor’s brightest technician” and P&P offered Cardiff the job of directing the movie’s technicolor scenes, with their regular DOP, erwin hiller, who had never lit a colour picture, helming the monochrome sequences. but the more experienced hiller couldn’t face the professional humiliation of a job share and walked away from the movie. “he was a proud man and couldn’t see this suggestion in any other way other than as a put-down,” lamented Powell.
as much of a star of the movie as niven or hunter would be alfred Junge’s strikingly expressionist sets. there’s certainly something of william Cameron Menzies’
Things To Come in P&P’s formidably modernist afterlife, with its gleaming white surfaces and towering greek statues. the production’s centrepiece set, however, would be the seemingly eternal stairway that separates earth from heaven, in reality a gargantuan escalator (nicknamed ethel on set), weighing in at 85 tonnes and with 106 20-foot steps. but it’s also the impish humour at work that makes this afterlife so exquisitely british and iconoclastic, as in the drinks machine pumping out Coca-Cola bottles to quench the thirst of the disembarking Yanks and the dry cleaning bags that carry the angels’ wings for the new arrivals.
A Matter Of Life And Death premiered on 1 november 1946, the first movie to be awarded a royal Command Film Performance with both the King and queen in attendance. but reviews, as for most of Powell and Pressburger’s proudly eccentric pictures, were mixed. The Observer’s film critic just seemed perplexed by the movie, writing, “[it] leaves us in great doubts whether it is intended to be serious or gay.” Kinograph
Weekly, on the other hand, praised it as a “brilliantly conceived phantasmagoria, deftly executed in technicolor.” Yet for most of the decades after, A Matter Of
Life And Death, like its directors, remained wickedly underloved. it was only in the 1970s and ’80s, with a little help from eager young fan Martin scorsese, that P&P would find themselves critically rehabilitated and A
Matter Of Life And Death would take its rightful place in the pantheon of british film greats. ironic, then, that a movie that goes out of its way to tell us that the afterlife is a nonsense had quite the afterlife itself.