Arguably the finest directors to hail from the United Kingdom, the filmmaking pair of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have likely influenced your favorite auteurs working today. As evident by the documentary Made in England, told through the eyes of one of their most passionate admirers, Martin Scorsese, love for Powell and Pressburger has not waned. With their expressive visual style and emotionally enthralling stories about ordinary people and high-ranking officials, the Archers (the moniker of the directing team) are easy to obsess over.
Throughout the 1940s, they made countless classics, from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to The Red Shoes. The quintessential Powell-Pressburger film, the wartime-set afterlife drama A Matter of Life and Death, was released during their apex and underlines their deeply romantic and critical beats as filmmakers in a story about grappling with the most daunting aspects of life through a simple love story.
The Life-Affirming Value of Love Is Evident in ‘A Matter of Life and Death’
Released in a post-World War II climate in 1946, the world was reeling from the loss and trauma of this deadly global conflict. In America, nationalist spirits attempted to conceal the melancholy by emphasizing the triumph surrounding the Allied victory, and Hollywood responded with an onslaught of film noirs, which tapped into the dark side of everyday American life. A Matter of Life and Death reflects the poignant sentiments of a nation battered by war despite being told that everything is fine.
The film, an all-encompassing story about humanity, is told through the lens of an endearing romance between Royal Air Force pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) and June (Kim Hunter), a young American woman serving as a radio operator for the U.S. Air Force. Plummeting to the ground during a bombing, Peter miraculously escapes death, but a liaison working for an otherworldly world in the afterlife arrives to inform him that he’s been mistakenly kept alive, and Peter is forced to argue for his survival before a heavenly court. His defense for remaining alive? He found a true love in June.
In what is possibly the most unexpectedly charming meet-cute in cinematic history, Peter and June fall in love over the radio moments before he awaits his fatal crash on the ground. Peter, an air raider with a glib view of life, experiences a fortuitous divine intervention, sparing his life. Powell and Pressburger, incredibly romantic filmmakers, make you feel deeply attached to this relationship with life-and-death intensity. Rather than getting bogged down in the intricacies of the afterlife’s politics and trial procedurals, A Matter of Life and Death uses this stirring romance to carry the narrative momentum.
Peter’s Air Force background makes him unappreciative of the beauties of life, and his discovery of an eternal romantic partner in June provides him with a heroic arc. Before the afterlife court, the only defense Peter can mount is the power of love, something more potent than the afterlife’s pedantic means of deciding someone’s life’s worth. Of all the veterans in WWII, Peter is one of the lucky ones — not just because he survived, but because he avoided the dreary listlessness of veterans post-combat.
Because of the fantastical nature of the story, A Matter of Life and Death could be read as an allegory about post-war disillusionment. Survivors of the war could feasibly carry immense guilt for not saving the fallen troops and the atrocities of war that were far beyond their control. By focusing on the mental strain that Peter’s trips to the afterlife cause him, Powell and Pressburger allow the viewer to read the trial as an act of self-repentance in the pilot’s psychology. Due to the innate militarized indoctrination of a soldier, a court of law would seem like a feasible platform to determine one’s right to live.
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For the afterlife, a bureaucratic body uncannily resembling the federal government, Peter only survived because surveyors failed to identify him while parachuting from a burning jet due to heavy fog. He was meant to die because the heavenly government (disguising itself as natural fate) determines that brave fighters are expected to die in combat, and they have little interest in hearing about Peter’s romantic enlightenment. Amid this story of love and triumph, Powell and Pressburger find room to lay down incendiary anti-war commentary against the British government, which is shown to have taken zero responsibility for the horrors of war. The directors boldly lampoon Great Britain for taking victory laps over defeating fascism and the Nazis despite being global imperialists responsible for immeasurable bloodshed for hundreds of years. In the niche genre of afterlife movies, the Powell and Pressburger classic soars on a cloud above them all. The film, which doesn’t try to understand the machinations of the afterlife, is about love triumphing above all, let’s say, matters of life and death.
A Matter of Life and Death is available to buy on Amazon in the U.S.
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A Matter of Life and Death
- Release Date
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December 15, 1946
- Director
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Emeric Pressburger
- Cast
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David Niven
, Kim Hunter
, Roger Livesey
, Marius Goring
, Robert Coote
, Kathleen Byron
, Richard Attenborough
, Bonar Colleano
, Joan Maude
, Robert Atkins
, Edwin Max
, Betty Potter
, Abraham Sofaer
, Raymond Massey
, Robert Arden
, Robert Beatty
, Tommy Duggan
, Leslie Dwyer
, John Longden
, Lois Maxwell
, Wally Patch
, Laurence Payne
, Robert Rietti
, Roger Snowdon
, Emile Stemmler - Runtime
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104 minutes
