A true marvel, A Matter of Life and Death is one of the best films by the storied English filmmaking team known as the Archers: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Among other felicities, this 1946 fantasy has one of the most crackling opening ten minutes of any movie you\342\200\231ll ever see: after a deceptively dreamy prologue, we are thrown into the conversation between an airman (David Niven) whose torched plane is about to crash in the English Channel, and an American military radio operator (Kim Hunter) operating the radio on the ground. Their touching exchange, made urgent by his imminent death, is breathtakingly visualized (you have never seen a WWII plane interior quite as vividly as this). What follows is glorious: Niven\342\200\231s death has been missed by an otherworldly collector (Marius Goring)\342\200\224all that thick English fog, you know\342\200\224and so he gets to argue his case for life before a heavenly tribunal. The heaven sequences are in pearly black-and-white, the earthly material in stunning Technicolor (the color is the cause of a particularly good in-joke). The Powell-Pressburger brief on behalf of humanity is both romantic and witty, and the wonderful cast is especially enriched by Roger Livesey (the star of Powell and Pressburger\342\200\231s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp), as a doctor with a camera obscura and an enormous heart. \342\200\224Robert Horton

1946

3700146550830

Movie

1.33:1

130

1

2

~€14.95

2024-09-25

2018-02-07 18:21:18