A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Can anyone else smell frying onions?

Elevator pitch

When American radio operator June (Kim Hunter) gets a message from Lancaster pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) , who is about to jump from his flaming bomber without a parachute, she fully expects him to die. Miraculously he doesn’t and the two, who have fallen for each other across the airwaves, finally meet. But is this a miracle or a mistake? Peter starts having visions of a messenger from the afterlife (Marius Goring) who tells him he must give up this new lease of life and love. June, meanwhile, enlists the help of a friendly neurologist (Roger Livesey) who recommends Peter have brain surgery, even as he is tried in a court of the afterlife on a matter of life and death.

Made by the mid-century British film-making team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — collectively known as ‘The Archers’ — A Matter of Life and Death is a film of contradictions. Not just the titular contradiction between life and death, or the contradictions of the story between the real and the imaginary, or the contradictions of the plot between individual rights and collective responsibility.

It is also a film about life after death that tries very hard not to be religious. It is a film about the deep animosity between two allies in a war effort, Britain and America. And it is a war film that manages to not be about the war.

At least, it’s not about the war bits of the war: the shooting and the shouting, the grand strategy and the immediate violence, the horrors and the glory. It starts with a city on fire from ‘a thousand-bomber raid’ and a Lancaster on fire somewhere over the fog-bound channel, but after that it’s all sleepy English villages, a modernist afterlife and debates about love and life after death.

Besides, even that moment of actual wartime action has already been put into cosmic context by a deliriously charming opening sequence. Normally, an opening explanatory caption and expository voiceover are signs that whoever is involved is not quite convinced of their premise, their storytelling ability or, indeed, their story.

But here it is a sign of sure-footedness, a confident introduction of tone and of yet another contradiction: it is partly whimsical and partly sardonic, simultaneously waspish and sentimental, like the titles of The Clangers being narrated by Carol Reed in the style of his opening to The Third Man (1949).

It also sets the approach to the war A Matter of Life and Death will be taking, a film about the themes and the effects, not the action. That opening is curiously reminiscent of another film of 1946: It’s A Wonderful Life, a weird mixture of the personal, the cosmic and the mystical, perhaps because both are responding to a contemporary need for spiritual succour in an all too scientifically real world. A war in which the most extraordinary technological achievements of the human mind have been combined with the worst instincts of the human soul, leaving people looking for an answer beyond that science.

It is also, though, a film about what the war was about (to some degree). Part of the inspiration for it was to try and repair some of the damage done to Anglo-American relations in the wake of the build-up to D-Day, when Britain had had visited upon it thousands of G.I.s, ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’, and had not liked it one bit.

The film, then, centres not just on a relationship between a British man and an American woman (the reverse of what every British serviceman abroad was fearing), but also on that central contradiction of the war: that it was a combined and centralised effort to defend the freedom of the individual against totalitarian oppression (allegedly). Indeed the film uses the term ‘the rights of the uncommon man’, meaning that no one is ‘common’; everyone is extraordinary. And that it is, paradoxically, this tradition of diversity and distinctiveness that conjoins the two cultures.¹

Delights

When I told Rowan I’d re-watched A Matter of Life and Death for this piece, she asked if I’d had a little cry. Lady, I cried all the way through. I had to keep rewinding because I couldn’t see a lot of it through the tears. These were tears of joy, I should add. Tears of relief and delight. Tears of relief at watching something so enjoyable, tears of delight at the talent and craft on display, Stendahl tears of joy at living in a world where this film exists.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) might be my favourite, and every film of The Archers’ imperial phase, from Blimp to The Red Shoes (1948), is an unalloyed masterpiece; but I do think A Matter of Life and Death is probably their best. Perhaps not a major work of art like The Red Shoes, or an eccentric delight like A Canterbury Tale (1944), but one of the great movies. One and a half hours of unimpeachable entertainment.

But then I think that about whatever the last Powell and Pressburger film was that I watched.

One of the deep delights of Powell and Pressburger movies is that they are ‘Powell and Pressburger’ movies. They are not films written by Emeric Pressburger and directed by Michael Powell. Pressburger wrote the first drafts and then they both worked on the scripts; Powell directed, but Pressburger was always on set and everyone involved was constantly contributing. Apparently Powell often left the editing to be overseen by Pressburger. All films, even ‘auteur’ works are, to some extent, collaborations; but the films of the Archers remain some of the greatest examples of joint creativity, the meld of brilliant minds into a single purpose and project that does something no single creator could manage.

Disappointments

Only that it had to finish.

Look, I know some people find Powell and Pressburger films annoying. Too visually florid, too bourgeois, too whimsical. That they do not revel enough in adolescent angst, in the agonies and grit of the world, and instead concentrate too much on adult themes like love, art and spirituality.

To be fair, this is largely a matter of taste. I like the whimsical. I like the fact that there’s a whole scene in A Matter of Life and Death in which Roger Livesey’s Dr Reeves uses his camera obscura to show the village to his spaniels (actually Michael Powell’s cockers Erik and Spangle). I like the fact that when Peter Carter comes to on the beach, the first person he comes across is a naked boy playing the pan pipes to a herd of goats, and that when he goes under the anaesthetic for his final operation, two massive artificial eyelids close over the camera to mimic the oncoming of unconsciousness. It’s ludicrous nonsense, but it’s adorable and entertaining ludicrous nonsense.

But I also think that that whimsy has a point. Dr Reeves is insistent that Peter has to take what appear to be hallucinations seriously; he collapses any crude contradiction between the physical brain and the metaphysical self it generates. He believes that imaginings can be just as real to the brain as any insults to its physical grey matter. The role of the imagination as a uniquely human and humanising quality is central to the film.

Peter Carter describes his politics as ‘Conservative by nature, Labour by experience.’ This was the politics of a post-war Britain, where a war in defence of the rights of the individual had fostered a great sense of communal purpose, an imaginative sense of humanity as an identity, an imagining of how the world could be improved.

Imagination fuels our empathy and sympathy, allowing us to identify with the sorrows of others and the horror with which the world is full. But it also gives us a harbour from those horrors, an escapist hatch through which we can glimpse the wonders of the world and discover the spiritual solace of art.

Besides, one is starved for technicolour down here.

Can we show the kids?

There is one very good reason to try, especially for British kids. Right now, like a lot of places around the world, Britain is undergoing a resurgence of the reactionary right, and a poisonous efflorescence of exactly the kind of patriotism that Dr Johnson described as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’.

A Matter of Life and Death falls directly into a sequence of Archers’ films that mounts a little inquiry into the matter of Britain — or, more specifically, England — and clearly offers an alternative form of patriotism.

The film is admirably clear eyed about history, for a start. A key part of the otherworldly trial that unfolds while Peter Carter undergoes brain surgery is that it is impossible to empanel a jury that is not biased against the English. The actions of the British Empire means that there isn’t anyone from anywhere around the world who doesn’t have a well-founded grudge.

The one defence of the English that cannot be countered is Dr Reeves’s list of poets: ‘John Donne, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats... and Milton and Shakespeare.’ It is no mistake that Peter Carter is himself a poet.

Where the film finds Englishness is in English itself. Not in flattering and false histories or imagined national identities, but in culture. In poetry and imagination; in, indeed, film-making. In how a diversity of voices can come together to make a distinctive inheritance of language and art.

Basically I’m arguing that an easy rhyme or a bad pun are more truly patriotic than zip-typing a Chinese-made, Amazon-ordered St George’s Cross to a council lamppost.

Is It As Good As You Remember?

The Archers’ movies became somewhat unfashionable in the ‘50s and ‘60s, which meant they largely escaped the Boomer hagiography of New Hollywood and the Bank Holiday institutionalisation of Bond and Carry On movies.

They began to be rediscovered in the ‘70s and ‘80s, to the point where two of the only three British movies in the top 100 of the Sight and Sound poll of the best films of all time are by Powell and Pressburger: The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death.

This gave the young Generation X cinema-goer the sense of discovering lost classics, movies that came from a very different ‘40s to the one we had been shown in all those classic Second World War movies on long, dreary Sunday TV afternoons. Movies that gave an alternative view of that war and what it might have meant for Britain.

And that meant they also gave an alternative model of Britain to those of us growing up in the ‘80s. Not a prosaic and practical, consumerist country run by City traders, but one full of romance and poetry and mysticism. An imaginary country, in two, contradictory senses: a country the imaginative culture of which has shaped and continues to shape the entire world and, nevertheless, a country that has never existed.

And still doesn’t. But it’s nice to imagine it now and again.

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The whimsey and engagement with imagination of Powell and Pressburger’s films is oddly reminiscent of the animated films of Studio Ghibli:

1. Of course, it’s worth noting that one of the things the British public found difficult was the segregation within the American army and the film has to rather pussyfoot around the issues of racism on both sides of the Atlantic in order to make its point stand up.