Movie: A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
A double feature of The Best Years of Our Lives and A Matter of Life and Death may give you a better understanding of the horrors of World War 2 than almost any film actually depicting those horrors. A Matter of Life and Death only gives you a small glimpse at the beginning. In the final days of the war Peter Carter (David Niven) is flying over the British Channel as his plane is about to go down. Expecting to die, he is trying to have one final conversation, tinged with courage and melancholy, with his radio operator June (Kim Hunter). Miraculously, he survives the plane crash. Even more miraculously, the plane crashes at the beach where June is working. Much less miraculously, they immediately fall in love, only for Peter to be visited by a messenger from Heaven, telling him an administrative mistake had been made. He was supposed to die in the plane crash, but due to the British fog, Death couldn't find him. Now he hast to make the case for his life before the heavenly court.
The film is both more mysterious and fantastic and more grounded in reality than that description makes it sound. We never find out how Peter survived his crash or how that crash brought him straight in the arms of June. But the film also immediately makes clear that the messenger from Heaven is only a hallucination, the consequence of a neurological disorder Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey), a friend of June, is trying to diagnose and cure. It never really becomes clear what that neurological disorder is exactly but what matters is that it is real and curable. What matters even more is that June is never scared or put off by what Peter tells her, and that both she and Frank fully believe that he is seeing exactly what he is telling them, and have a plan for how to help him. They do so with kindness, care and a real sense of urgency, as if nothing in the world matters more than helping a hurt man.
It should be clear by now that this is very much a message movie, that aims to give direction and comfort to the Brits after the war. But while there are moments when it plays as the most expensive PSA ever made, it's also a staggeringly great and ambitious film and an artistic and technical high-wire act, pulling off complex shots and special effects and visual, tonal, narrative and thematic shifts few films would even think of. Especially mindblowing is a shot in which we see Peter looking at a lamp from the point of view of his eyes. The lamp is perfectly framed within his eyelids, making it look like an iris. Its a visual representation of the closing of an eye seen from the point of view of said eye closing. To even conceive of a shot like that is genius. To actually pull it off, is something else completely. There are more examples of such virtuosity (the camera obscura!), but on top of all that this is also a deeply compassionate film, using the language of British patriotism to make a call for global solidarity and brotherhood in the context of the shellshocked vulnerability of the people and societies surviving the war, and their inability to make sense of it. The plane crash and the neurological disorder are good metaphors for its view of the war. The world survived, but it was a lucky escape; we have no real idea how that exactly happened, or what it exactly survived, but we somehow got to work together to make sure it never happens again.
It's easy to imagine how moving the first scenes of heaven (connected to our world by a giant mechanical staircase) must have been to audiences in 1946. Filmed in black and white, we see young pilots getting in, ready to check in and get some food. They are greeted by kind and professional female nurses and administrative workers, showing them the way around their new residence. These scenes are an immediate reminder of the sacrifices made by both men and women during the war, but also a comforting fantasy. It gives the audience a possibility to imagine a less grim ending for their dead countrymen, to see them not just as dead bodies under the ground but as lively souls who still have opportunities for joy and happiness. Just when you think the film may present a too rosy picture of death, it sends its heavenly messenger to England to find Peter. Through a nice meta-joke ('One is starved for Technicolor up there') the Earth is immediately contrasted from heaven. Even more so when the messenger finds Peter and June making gentle love among the colorful flowers and fields.
As Peter's hallucinations increase (during which, from his POV, time stops and the people around him are frozen in mid-action), he learns that the trial's prosecutor will be Abraham Farlan, the first American to be killed by a British bullet, who objects to a love between the English Peter and the American June. Abraham Farlan is a completely fictional character, which gets to another brilliant gambit of the film. Its heaven is occupied by all the great thinkers, lawyers and statesmen of history, from Plato and Socrates to Lincoln, Walter Scott and Cardinal Richelieu. But we don't see any of them (except for John Bunyan in a very brief cameo), only hear the characters gossip about them, giving a rather wonderful impression of heaven as the greatest salon ever, filled with great pontificators exasperating each other. It must have been incredibly tempting to include a couple of scenes where we see them doing that, or to turn the trial of Peter into a rhetorical battle between the likes of George Washington and William Shakespeare. But that approach would have ruined the magic, besides for the film's intents it is important that the debate takes place between everymen. That does lead to the film's one somewhat false note. Just before his operation, Peter finds out that dr. Frank is killed in a motor accident, allowing him to become his defense counsel.
The trial is set in a majestic courthouse in which Abraham and Frank debate each other from two giant plateaus on either side of it, and where there is room for all the people in heaven to attend. The trial largely serves the same function as Charlie Chaplin's famous speech in The Great Dictator, but it's better integrated in the film's story. Moreover, it's a wonderfully edited sequence. Each cut during the trial makes dramatic and emotional sense, while also enriching, complicating and complementing the points made by the counsels. Starting off as a debate on Peter and June's love for each other, it quickly moves to become a discussion on the similarities and differences between Britain and America, the ways in which personal and national identities are intertwined (and to what extent they are), Britain's place in the post-war world, the ideal of America, and the need for cooperation and love between the two nations, and the rest of the world.
The trial is attended by nurses, soldiers, nuns and all kinds of other people who participated in the war effort. Some of them are the same people we saw in the first impression of heaven, but this time there are also Asians, black people, Indians and many other races and nationalities in the audience. In the jury too, which consists of a Frenchman, A Dutchman who fought in the Boer War, a Russian who fought in the Crimean War, a Chinese man, an Indian and a Irishman. After both Frank and Abraham note that the jury is stacked against the British, and Abraham sings the praises of American individuality, Frank demands an all-American jury. He gets one consisting of a French-American, a Dutch-American, an Irish-American, a black American, an Asian-American and an American of vaguely Eastern-European origin. Its a sincere argument for the melting pot, made with visual elegance, one which you'd wish more contemporary films would make. It's also a refutation of Abrahams' ideas about national identity. He illustrates those by dropping a glass on the floor, and arguing that it's in the glass' nature to break, a nature it can't escape no matter how hard it tries. There are obviously no Germans in the film's heaven, but the film's ultimate message that individuals can overcome their nation's history, culture and identity can be seen (though was probably not intended that way) as an olive branch towards peace and reconciliation.
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