A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Love is rescued from the jaws of the afterlife in the Archers’ delirious World War II air-pilot fantasia.

Set in a gorgeously photographed Technicolor England and a monochrome heaven, A Matter of Life and Death took the imaginative daring of jointly credited writer-producer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to new heights.

David Niven plays a British airman who survives a plane crash and falls in love with an American radio operator (Kim Hunter), only to be summoned to the afterlife by a heavenly ‘Conductor’ (Marius Goring). But is heaven just a hallucination brought on by brain injury?

Powell and Pressburger layer breathtaking visual tricks on top of this whimsical premise, such as a celebrated point-of-view shot in which our hero’s eyelid closes over the camera lens. The film also works as a sly satire on Anglo-American relations at the end of WWII.

“There are more stunning ideas in this one film, concerning a mistake made in heaven about a WWII pilot who should be dead but isn’t, than the whole of British cinema can usually muster in a decade.” Nick James

“A most peculiar and potent cocktail of romance, theology, global bridge-building and national tub-thumping, this thoughtful drama about one pilot’s deferred mortality remains, if nothing else, a definitive monument to the power of Technicolor. The vivid imagery and the cineliterate style(s) deployed by a creative team at the top of their game express the film’s intricate worldview. It searingly conveys a world grappling with uncharted new places, trying to pick up the pieces after unimaginable calamity.” James Healy

1946 United Kingdom
Directed by
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Produced by
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Written by
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Featuring
David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey
Running time
104 minutes

Ranked in The Greatest Films of All Time poll

Sight and Sound

Who voted for A Matter of Life and Death

Critics

Mark Adams
UK
Ina Archer
USA
Henry Barnes
UK
Anahit Behrooz
UK
Maya S. Cade
USA
David Cairns
UK
Ian Christie
UK
Kevin Coyne
Ireland
Bryony Dixon
UK
Hannah Gatward
UK
Elinor Groom
UK
Michael Hayden
UK
Jamie Healy
UK
Sandra Hebron
UK
Maggi Hurt
UK
Larushka Ivan-Zadeh
UK
Nick James
UK
Aleksandar S. Janković
Serbia
Lisa Kerrigan
UK
Ben Luxford
UK
Victoria Luxford
UK
Robert Mitchell
UK
Christina Newland
UK/USA
John Nugent
UK
Yasmin Omar
UK
Mark Salisbury
UK
David Sims
USA
Jai Arjun Singh
India
Rosie Taylor
UK
Laura Venning
UK
Sean Welsh
UK
Hillary Weston
USA
Adrian Wootton
UK
John Wyver
UK
Gregory Zinman
USA

Directors

Joe Dante
USA
Jeanie Finlay
UK
Sharon Maguire
UK
Martin Mcdonagh
Ireland
May Miles Thomas
UK
Sally Potter
Tilda Swinton
UK