A Matter of Life and Death

Just before he dives, without parachute, from his crippled bomber, an RAF pilot speaks with a radio dispatcher.  The conversation is extravagant with doomed gallantry and the pilot says that he loves the young woman with whom he is speaking before plunging out of the flaming cockpit.  But, somehow, the pilot survives and, even, washes up under the cliffs of Dover.  There he meets the girl and confirms his love for her.  But it turns out that the pilot was supposed to have died and that a bureaucrat from the Agency of heaven failed to retrieve him from the deadly sea because of a "pea soup" fog.  The bureaucrat, a French man who lost his head in the revolution, descends to earth to seize the pilot.  The airman claims that his love for the girl merits an appeal to the heavenly tribunal -- since he wasn't plucked from the sea as a corpse, the pilot claims he's entitled to continue living.  On the earthly plane, the pilot suffers from headaches and interprets his visions of the After Life as hallucinations.  A neurologist diagnoses his condition as a kind of sub-arachnoid hemorrhage and surgery is scheduled.  This surgery coincides with the trial in the Court of Heaven in which the pilot argues that he be allowed to remain alive, primarily because of his love for the young woman.  This summarizes, in bare fashion, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's wholly remarkable A Matter of Life and Death (1946)  

I saw this film many years ago and was impressed by it.  There are several Hollywood variants on these themes including the Spencer Tracy vehicle A Guy named Joe and Steven Spielberg's Always in which the  doomed pilot flies missions putting out forest fires.  The Hollywood iterations of the theme, which are really about helpful ghosts, are interesting and, even, affecting, but they lack the utter grandiose strangeness and eccentricity of Powell and Pressburger's film.  Although I accurately remembered some of the elements of the English movie, my memory didn't serve me with respect to the strange splendor of the film.  First, the picture begins on an emotional pitch on which most movies would end -- the scenes of David Niven (as the pilot) in the flaming cockpit are imbued with wild pictorial intensity that is purely expressionistic.  Nothing is portrayed realistically -- it is all stylized:  the beautiful girl dispatcher is an ethereal pale wraith floating in a void that is filled with odd theatrical lighting.  The pilot's cockpit seems to sit athwart a fiery oven and billows with orange flame illumining the face of the dead co-pilot sprawled on the bomber's floor.  Everything is shot from inside fiery-looking sets.  The huge close-ups are lurid with flame-light (even in the undefined space where the girl is located.)  Then, the pilot's body is a tiny speck on a vast mud-flat.  When he hikes up from the sea, he first encounters a black dog and, then, a completely naked shepherd boy who is playing a flute to his goats.  (I have no idea what these visual frissons are supposed to mean, but they are startling and beautiful.)  The first woman that the pilot encounters is the dispatcher, an American girl (Kim Hunter) with a limpid cream complexion.  The pilot woos her in a bower of huge drooping flowers, again a vague location that seems more metaphysical than physical.  The scenes in heaven are filmed in icy, analytical black and white.  A woman who looks like Hera presides over a kind of celestial court -- the light makes halos around her and she looks fierce and terrifying, like an embodiment of Justice.  Heaven consists of a vast ceiling pierced by oval openings in which heavenly beings look down on enormous amphitheaters crowded with the dead.  The trial is conducted with the rock of Areopagus in the background lit like a fragment of a glacier with great illumined rays pouring up from the chilly white platforms.  The Judge is obviously Jewish with a great crooked nose and he looks about with placid, refined dignity, again another embodiment of the fearful nobility of the law.  (We later discover that this man is also the neurosurgeon who operates on the hero -- we discover this when he removes his surgical mask.)  The trial itself is almost Kafkaesque -- it deviates into strange channels:  for instance, much is made of the difference between England and its former colony America.  (The Judge is from Boston and supposedly prejudiced against Englishmen, for instance, the pilot, although we see nothing like this in his elegant and regal demeanor.)  The climax of the film involves an enormous white staircase that moves like an escalator past statues of former luminaries done in the flayed style of Giacometti -- this is surely one of the greatest sets in film history; reportedly it weighed 75 tons and its remarkable to think of all the money spent on what is a majestic and wholly surreal apparatus.  There are other curious, almost inexplicable, elements to the film -- the compassionate village doctor, who is a  sort of medical genius, has a camera obscura that projects a vivid image of the village in which he lives into a darkened chamber. This suggests that we are all prisoners in the dark room of our skulls or imagination.  (This motif is transmuted into an image of the pilot's point of view when he shuts his eyes under anesthesia -- we see a  kind of oval stage fringed by eyelashes which descend like a curtain when he falls asleep.)  These odd elements of the film, and its sense of being wholly interior, that is confined almost claustrophobically, to interior spaces suggests something like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge  -- perhaps, everything is just a hallucination in the pilot's dying brain.  (This was suggested by Ben Mankiewicz on TCM when the movie was shown as one of the Essentials).  I don't think this theory is right, but it's suggestive.  The film is comprised of huge luminous close-ups that seem vaguely unreal -- no one's face looks as spectacular as these vast soft-focus portraits.  Even scenes outdoors feel as if they are inside -- the love scene in the bower takes place in a location deliriously full of huge, sexualized flowers:  it doesn't look like anyplace on earth.  Heaven is glacial with iis bureaucrats stationed at chunks of ice behind which we see acres of folded white wings -- conspicuously, although heaven is full of Brits and their allies, we don't see any Germans.  Roger Livesey, a regular with Powell and Pressburger plays the neurologist.  He careens around the countryside on a motorcycle and, at least, one of the shots of him on that vehicle is similar to scene of T. H. Lawrence on his motorbike in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia -- if I am not mistaken Lean cites the shot directly and literally.  An example of the stylized, expressionistic manner in which Powell and Pressburger work is a sequence in which the neurologist crashes his motorcycle and burns to death.  We see an enormous ferocious close-up of the doctor's face covered in goggles and lit by lightning bolts -- it's a thunderstorm and his helmet gushes water.  Then, there's a shot of an oncoming lorry that passes through the frame.  We hear a crash.  The film cuts to a pillar of fire with the doctor's helmet spinning like a top at the bottom of the frame.  Then, there's a close-up of an onlooker's face who sees the doctor's body on fire (we don't) and turns away his head in horror.  This is sufficient to make the point and far more memorable than an account of the accident that showed us everything.  

The film isn't wholly successful -- the trial scene, although compelling is a bit windy with rhetoric:  Raymond Massey plays the prosecutor.  But even he is impressive, his profile like an eagle and his eyes flashing dramatically.  There are sequences that are charming but digressive -- for instance, we see American servicemen rehearsing as the "rude mechanicals" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  (Some of these scenes are similar to Powell and Pressburger's ineffably strange A Canterbury Tale, also involving GI's in England.)  Nonetheless, the film is a major accomplishment and highly recommended.