A Matter of Life and Death (film)

A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)
Kim Hunter and David Niven
Directed by	Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger
Produced by	Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger
Written by	Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger
Starring	David Niven Kim Hunter Roger Livesey Raymond Massey Marius Goring
Music by	Allan Gray
Cinematography	Jack Cardiff
Editing by	Reginald Mills
Distributed by	Eagle-Lion (UK) Universal (US)
Release date(s)	1 November 1946 (UK)
Running time	104 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	£320,000 (est.)

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is a romantic fantasy film set in World War II by the British writer-director-producer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It was originally released in U.S. under the title Stairway to Heaven, which derived from the film's most prominent special effect: a broad escalator linking the Other World and Earth. Reversing the effect in The Wizard of Oz, the supernatural scenes are in "Technicolor mono-chrome" (a special process developed jointly by Director of Photography Jack Cardiff and Technicolor London), while the natural scenes on Earth are in Technicolor. Photographic dissolves between "Technicolor mono-chrome" (the Other World) and Three-Strip Technicolor (Earth) are used several times during the film.

In 2004, A Matter of Life and Death was named the second greatest British film ever made by the magazine Total Film in a poll of 25 film critics, behind Get Carter.

Plot

Squadron Leader Peter Carter (David Niven) is a British Royal Air Force pilot trying to nurse a badly damaged and burning Lancaster bomber home after a mission in May 1945. His crew has already bailed out, but Carter's parachute has been shot up. He manages to get in touch with June (Kim Hunter), an American radio operator based in England, and talks with her in the few minutes before he is forced to jump without a parachute.

Peter should have died at that time, but does not because of a mistake on the part of Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), the guide sent from the "Other World" to collect him. The thick fog over the English Channel causes him to miss Peter. Instead, the airman wakes up the next day on a beach near June's base, completely bewildered to still be alive.

Peter meets June, who is cycling back from her night shift, and the pair fall in love. Conductor 71 (an aristocrat executed in the French Revolution) stops time to explain the situation to Peter and urge him to accept his death and proceed to the Other World. Peter refuses and demands that the matter be appealed. While Conductor 71 goes to consult his superiors, Peter continues to live his life. His visitor returns to inform him that he has been granted appeal and has three days to prepare his case and appoint a counsel, which he can pick among all the people who have ever lived but are now dead. The two spend that time discussing possible appointees, but Peter fails to choose one.

On Earth, Peter's visions of Conductor 71 are diagnosed by June's fascinated friend Doctor Reeves (Roger Livesey) as a symptom of a brain injury – chronic adhesive arachnoiditis from a concussion two years earlier – and he is scheduled for surgery. Reeves is killed in a traffic accident while trying to find the ambulance that was supposed to take Peter to the hospital, which allows him to act as counsel. He argues that, through no fault of his own, his "client" was given additional time on Earth and during that time he has fallen in love and now has an earthly commitment that should take precedence over the afterlife's claim on him.

The matter comes to a head – in parallel with Peter's brain surgery – before a celestial court of the whole population of the afterlife – the camera zooms out from an amphitheatre to reveal that it is as large as a spiral galaxy. The prosecutor is American Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), who hates the British for causing his death in the American Revolutionary War. Reeves challenges the composition of the jury, which is made up of representatives who are prejudiced against the British. In fairness, the jury is replaced by a cosmopolitan mixture of modern Americans whose origins mirror those they replace.

Reeves and Farlan both cite examples from British and world history to support their positions. In the end, Reeves has June take the stand (she is made to fall asleep in the "real" world by Conductor 71 so she can testify) and proves that she genuinely loves Peter by telling her that the only way to save his life is to take his place. She steps onto the stairway to the Other World without hesitation and is carried away, leaving Peter behind. Then the stairway comes to an abrupt halt and June rushes back to Peter's open arms. As Dr. Reeves triumphantly explains, "...nothing is stronger than the law in the universe, but on Earth, nothing is stronger than love."

The jury rules in Peter's favour. The Judge (Abraham Sofaer) shows Reeves and Farlan the new lifespan granted to the defendant; Reeves calls it "very generous", and Farlan reluctantly agrees to it. The scene then shifts to the operating room, where the surgery is declared a success by the surgeon (played by Sofaer).

Cast

• David Niven as Squadron Leader Peter David Carter
• Kim Hunter as June
• Roger Livesey as Doctor Frank Reeves
• Marius Goring as Conductor 71
• Raymond Massey as Abraham Farlan
• Abraham Sofaer as the Judge/Surgeon
• Joan Maude as the Chief Recorder
• Kathleen Byron as an Angel
• Richard Attenborough as an English Pilot
• Bonar Colleano as an American Pilot
• Robert Coote as Flying Officer Bob Trubshawe

Production

A Matter of Life and Death was filmed at D&P Studios and Denham Studios in Denham, Buckinghamshire, England, and on locations in Devon and Surrey. The beach scene was shot at Saunton Sands in Devon, and the village seen in the camera obscura was Shere in Surrey. Production took place from 2 September to 2 December 1945, used twenty-nine sets, and cost an estimated £320,000.

The film had an extensive pre-production period due to the complexity of the production:

The huge escalator linking this world with the other, called "Operation Ethel" by the firm of engineers who constructed it under the aegis of the London Passenger Transport Board, took three months to make and cost £3,000 (in 1946). "Ethel" had 106 steps, each 20 feet (6.1 m) wide, and was driven by a 12 h.p. engine. The full shot was completed by hanging miniatures. The noise of the machinery prevented recording the soundtrack live - all scenes with the escalator were dubbed post-production.

There was a nine-month wait for film stock and Technicolor cameras because they were being used by the US Army to make training films.

The decision to film the scenes of the "other world" in black and white added to the complications. Where they merge from black and white to colour, they were filmed in Technicolor, but the colour was not fully developed, giving a pearly hue to the black and white shots.

Other sequences also presented challenges, such as the stopped-action table-tennis game (for which Kim Hunter and Roger Livesey were trained by champions Alan Brooke and Viktor Barna), the scene where David Niven washes up on the beach, the first scene filmed, where cinematographer Jack Cardiff fogged up the camera lens with his breath to create the look he wanted, and the long, 25-minute trial sequence, which required a set with a 350-foot (110 m) long by 40-foot (12 m) high backcloth.

Release

The film was chosen for the first ever Royal Film Performance on 1 November 1946 in aid of the Cinematograph Trade Benevolent Fund. It then went into general release in the UK on 30 December 1946. It premiered in New York City on 25 December 1946 and in Los Angeles on 23 January 1947. (The American release changed the title - see below - and, in the initial release, cut the scenes showing a naked young goatherd following pressure from the National Legion of Decency. The scene is included in most versions available today, even those still titled Stairway to Heaven.)

In 1986 the film was screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Analysis

Are the visions real?

While the film never specifically states whether Peter's visions are real, the actor playing the judge also plays the brain surgeon. As is shown in the paper, "A Matter of Fried Onions" and subsequent work by Diane Broadbent Friedman, there was a large amount of medical research carried out to ensure that the symptoms shown agreed with a correct medical diagnosis of Peter Carter's condition.

Heaven?

The producers took pains never to refer to "the other world" as heaven, as they felt that was too restrictive and limiting. An introductory title screen (repeated as the Foreword to the 1946 novelization by Eric Warman) contains an explicit statement: "This is the story of two worlds, the one we know and another which exists only in the mind of a young airman whose life and imagination have been violently shaped by war", adding "Any resemblance to any other world known or unknown is purely coincidental". But it does not say if the other world portrayed is part of the world we know or part of Peter's hallucinations.

Powell and Pressburger objected to the American distributor's renaming the film Stairway to Heaven, but had to put up with it. The distributor believed that American audiences would not want to see a film with the word "Death" in the title, especially just after World War II. When Powell pointed out that the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday was released without any problems, he was told that the title was acceptable because death was holidaying.

The architecture of the other world is noticeably modernist, a vast and open plan, with huge circular observation holes, beneath which the clouds of Earth can be seen. This vision was later the inspiration for the design of a bus station in Walsall, England, by architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, and the film's amphitheatre court scene was rendered by BT in a TV advertisement in about 2002 as a metaphor for communication technology, especially the Internet.

Anglo-American relations

The film was originally suggested by a British government department to improve relations between the Americans in the UK and the British public following Powell and Pressburger's contributions to this sphere in A Canterbury Tale two years earlier, though neither film received any government funding nor input on plot or production. There was a degree of hostility against the American servicemen stationed in the UK for the invasion of Europe. They were viewed in some quarters as latecomers to the war and as "overpaid, oversexed and over here" by a public that had suffered three years of bombing and rationing, with many of their own men fighting abroad. The premise of the film is a simple inversion: The English pilot gets the pretty American woman rather than the other way round, and the only national bigotry is voiced by the first American casualty of the Revolutionary War against the British. Raymond Massey, portraying an American, was a Canadian national at the time the film was made, but became a naturalised American citizen afterward.

Adaptations

Radio

• The film was twice adapted for the Lux Radio Theater on American radio
  • Stairway to Heaven, 27 October 1947, Episode #587, starring Ray Milland
  • Stairway to Heaven, 12 April 1955, Episode #918, starring David Niven

• The film was adapted for the Screen Director's Playhouse series on American radio
  • Stairway to Heaven, 26 July 1951, starring Robert Cummings

TV

• The film was adapted for the Robert Montgomery Presents series on American TV
  • Stairway to Heaven, 9 April 1951 (NBC), starring Richard Greene
    Note: This was a live performance.

Theatre

• The film was adapted as the musical "Stairway to Heaven" at the King's Head in Islington in November 1994.
• The film was adapted as a play by the Kneehigh Theatre for performances at the National Theatre in London, premiering in May 2007.

In popular culture

• A still of the movie (the final "escalator" scene, with the trial court reunited at Carter's surgery) was used as the cover for Phil Collins's 1989 single "Something Happened on the Way to Heaven".
• The British popduo Pet Shop Boys used the escalator in the video for "Go West".
• The film inspired the song "A Matter of Life and Death" by Rinaldi Sings, featured on the 2005 album What's It All About. The song features a sample of Kim Hunter's voice from the film.
• The 2006 Iron Maiden album A Matter of Life and Death, which deals heavily with the themes of war and religion, takes its name from the film.
• The film is also referenced in an episode of the British sketch comedy Big Train, where three separate doomed pilots get their wires crossed with each other while talking to the female radio operator.

See also

• BFI Top 100 British films

References

Bibliography

• Christie, Ian. Arrows of Desire: the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. London: Faber & Faber, 1994. ISBN 0-571-16271-1. 163pp. (illus. filmog. bibliog. index)
• Christie, Ian. A Matter of Life and Death. London: British Film Institute, 2000. ISBN 0-85170-479-4
• Powell, Michael. A Life in Movies: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann, 1986. ISBN 0-434-59945-X.
• Powell, Michael. Million Dollar Movie. London: Heinemann, 1992. ISBN 0-434-59947-6.
• Warman, Eric. A Matter of Life and Death. London: World Film Publications, 1946.

External links

• A Matter of Life and Death at the Internet Movie Database
• A Matter of Life and Death is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• A Matter of Life and Death at the British Film Institute's Screenonline Full synopsis and film stills (and clips viewable from UK libraries).
• A Matter of Life and Death at the TCM Movie Database
• BFI's Top Twenty (British) Films
• Bus to Paradise, a review of the film inspired Walsall Bus Station.
• Reviews and articles at the Powell & Pressburger Pages
• Trailer at Virgin.net