A fantastic cock-and-bull story to salve the morale at the end of WWII, UK filmmaker-duo Powell and Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH whimsically goes off the beaten path to juxtapose two worlds side by side, the one on earth and the one in the afterlife (rigorously separated by its Technicolor/monochrome divide), only, in the center it is a hokey and far-fetched case of love-at-the-first-word, between a RAF pilot Peter Carter (Niven) and an American radio operator June (Hunter), their instant love after then becomes the rub of a celestial case, regarding Peter’s miraculous escape from death by jumping out of his burning bomber with a parachute (answerable by the thick fog over the England channel, lol!).
Since his survival is no fault of his own, purely a blip in the Almighty’s plan, Peter appeals against going to “the other world” as he has now fallen in love with June during the 20-odd borrowed hours, which gives him an obligation on earth (but it sounds feeble considering it is insensible to assume all those departed are taken without such earthly attachments), and he has to choose a counsel in the other world to defend his case.
With umpteen candidates to choose from (literally any dead beings who have once set their foot in this world), what Peter needs is a fresh one, British Dr. Reeves (Livesey), who, when he is alive, is fascinated by Peter’s brain injury and his claimed fantasy of meeting a time-stopping heavenly messenger known as Conductor 17 (Goring), must draw his last breath in a horrendous road accident to serve that singular purpose, and not one single tear is shed for him, alas!
During the celestial court (a wheeze to parallel it with a brain surgery on earth), Dr. Reeves is facing the prosecution team led by a grievance-driven American Abraham Farlan (Massey, out-of-sorts and grotesque), the first casualty in the hand of British army during American Revolutionary War, whose racist braggadocio might get under certain viewers’skin, the gist is that a British man is unworthy of an all-American gal. But eventually, the Anglo-American relations are channeled through an amicable solution when the gal willingly takes the place for the man she loves, why don’t they ask her first? Case closed.
For sure, the story doesn’t age quite well albeit the killer set-up, yet what puts AMoLaD’s name on the map is not its simplified message but a stunning, cutting-edge production design, from the opening astral projection, the modernist setting of the other world, to the “stairway to heaven” (which is used as its title in the North America), continuously rotating between earth and the afterlife (“heaven” is largely bypassed as a definition in the movie), and its immaculate chromatic transition between the two worlds.
The cast is serviceable, Niven has the chutzpah to claim that he is only 26 (in reality he is one decade senior), but Hunter squeezes enough gumption in a character that is devoid of any motivation on her own terms; Livesey is a stand-up dude, but it is Goring, playing a guillotined French aristocrat, ebulliently counterpoises the British gravitas with the much-needed levity and mannerism, a real hoot and a half, an epithet one can almost apply to the movie itself.
referential entries: Powell and Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES (1948. 7.9/10); BLACK NARCISSUS (1947, 8.3/10).
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