Powell and Pressburger’s romantic fantasy is funny, moving and easy to recommend to almost anyone. The speeches occasionally labour the point, but the colour and the performances make being alive seem worth all this celestial fuss.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger make an earthly romance important enough to trouble the administration of heaven, and they make us believe it deserves the attention. A Matter of Life and Death is a funny, moving fantasy that we would recommend well beyond the usual audience for tales of the afterlife. There is plenty of room here for the romance to be buried beneath the explanations. Powell and Pressburger usually know when to let their actors take over.
David Niven’s Peter Carter makes courtesy seem like a way of managing fear. Niven’s charm matters because it gives us someone to care about before we have sorted out the rules of the fantasy. Kim Hunter’s June is direct enough to stop their attachment feeling like an excuse for the scenery. Roger Livesey brings a reassuring warmth to Doctor Reeves. The performances have a deliberate theatrical quality, but their feelings are sufficiently clear that we never find ourselves waiting impatiently for the next special effect.
Jack Cardiff’s photography supplies the film’s clearest reason for wanting to stay alive: Earth gets Technicolor, while heaven is black and white. We found that monochrome heaven unexpectedly sad. Coming from the warmth of the earthly scenes, the loss of colour makes all its grandeur seem poor compensation. The device is simple enough to register at once, and Cardiff makes it carry feeling without requiring another speech.
Alfred Junge’s production design is just as important, especially the enormous heavenly amphitheatre, which gives the other world an intimidating public scale. The sheer size of the place helps us understand how easily an individual’s concerns could be dismissed here. Marius Goring, as Conductor 71, brings welcome mischief to the official business. His mannered performance belongs in these surroundings; playing it casually would make the whole place harder to accept.
Reginald Mills’s editing keeps the movements between worlds easy to follow, an important courtesy when the story asks us to accept so much. The colour changes do some of that work, but the film also needs a rhythm that can accommodate romance, jokes and extended discussion. Mills mostly finds it, though the talk does occasionally settle in for longer than it should. Allan Gray’s music helps sustain the warmth of the romance through these changes of setting and pace.
Powell and Pressburger’s screenplay is less sure when it makes the lovers carry the weight of relations between Britain and America. The generosity is welcome, especially in a story conscious of what war has cost people, but the national parallels can become laborious. We do not need quite so much encouragement to favour affection over mutual suspicion. The speeches sometimes explain the film’s humane feelings after the actors and the colour have already made them clear.
Romantic fantasy often depends on how readily we will forgive an absurd rule or an overcomplicated explanation. This one earns that forgiveness through the conviction of its actors and the pleasure of looking at the worlds Cardiff and Junge have made. At 104 minutes, it has room for some verbal excess without exhausting our goodwill. Watch it with someone who thinks old screen romances are timid, and allow time afterwards for them to reconsider.
