A Matter of Life and Death (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

I've been a fan of Powell and Pressburger (the Archers) films for quite a long time, and will happily take credit for introducing my wife and her friends to classics such as The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, I Know Where I'm Going, and others. Up to this point surely the highpoint of their collaboration has been The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, but I didn't know A Matter of Life and Death was the first in that magnificent trio, and didn't have access to see it by any means until only recently. Seriously. The library didn't have it. YouTube didn't have. Amazon? Netflix? Didn't. Have. It. Finally in desperation I signed up for DVD.com (the mail service formerly known as Netflix) just so I could see this movie to see if I liked it (on a cruddy DVD copy with washed out VHS-like picture). I was so amazed by this film I swiftly pre-ordered the blu ray. And now at last, the trio is united under my roof!A Matter of Life and Death is a rare picture in many ways. It's story is simple. REALLY simple. A soldier survives a crash that should kill him, washes up on a beach and meets the last person he spoke to the on the radio. It's love at first sight. Unfortunately there has been an error in the next life and he's not supposed to be alive, so an agent of the next world comes to fetch him. Only he wont' go. Is he having delusions? Is it real? Who knows! But to him it's real and if he doesn't have brain surgery swiftly his doctor is worried he's lose his mind. Which coincides with the fact that he's on trial in the next world to determine his fate. Is the plot pretty wild? Yup. Is it simple? Very. It's also AWESOME.I'll honestly say that it's unlikely a film like this could be made today, because there's just too much jaded cynicism in the world. Someone's right to live JUST because they fell in love? Give me a break, right? People get divorced all the time. Love is no big deal!...But if you are a hopeless romantic like me, and cling to the idea of meeting and marrying, and spending the rest of your life with your one true love, this film is wonderful in it's message (even if it is a bit of post-war propaganda on the power of love...between the British and the Americans[!]).The cinematography is Jack Cardiff work at it's most spectacular, the special effects are some of the finest in any film EVER (keep an eye out how all ambient sound stops when time stops, books fly from the floor back to the shelf when time rewinds, and when time stops in the hospital multiple people walk through walls [!]). The effects are old-school optical, and they are used to serve the story. There's no computer-assisted/CGI here. When time freezes the actors are holding as still as they can. But when a woman is watching what may be the last moments of the love of her life and a tear is captured from her cheek on a flower as evidence to prove her devotion is real... I couldn't help but be moved by the sincerity and power of emotion.The acting is uniformly great in this film, and like "I know where I'm going" there isn't a single character I dislike. I like the American Girl, the British Pilot, the emissary sent to bring him back, and especially the doctor. Seeing delusions treated with kindness and compassion in order to help someone through a crisis real or imagined again, is a just incredibly moving.The stairway to heaven is a literal set prop and it is magnificent. All of the sets in the next world are fantastic in every sense of the word. And the jump between black and white and color in this film is some of the greatest I've ever seen. Even if you aren't crazy about the story etc, this film is worth watching for the special effects and set pieces alone.I most love this film because it makes the ordinary into the epic (that and making the epic into the ordinary are the two hardest things to do in story-telling in my opinion). It tells a small story in a grand fantastic way, and lifts the spirit of all those who watch it. The glorious blu ray with it's gorgeous high definition transfer is a credit to Criterion and will doubtless get this film the attention is deserves after all these years.If you enjoy fantasy films with a bit of ambiguity (the film never says if what you see is real or not, or if the next world is heaven or not (and even hints strongly that it's all a dream... and I like it that way). If you like the Powell and Pressburger collaborations and haven't seen this film, buy it immediately. There's nothing more that I can say.

Niven, one of the great British stars of Hollywood's Golden Era, needs no introduction. Powell might: under the name of their production company, The Archers, he and his colleague, Emeric Pressburger, wrote, produced, and directed some of the most visually arresting, thoroughly English movies of the 1940s and 1950s (probably the best known being "The Red Shoes"). Powell claimed that "A Matter of Life and Death," released in the US as "Stairway to Heaven," was his personal favorite of all his films. Niven claimed the same of all the movies in which he starred.This movie's bizarre premise was based on an actual event: a World War II airman fell to earth without a parachute yet survived. This set Powell's mind a-whirring: how could such a thing have happened? Flip the premise of "It's a Wonderful Life" for the answer: an angel (here, "Conductor 71") showed up too late to escort Niven's character to heaven because the envoy got lost in that beastly British fog. Complication: just before our pilot jumped, he bonded with an American radio operator (played by Kim Hunter in her first starring role). Soon they meet and fall passionately in love—not lust, but genuine love. Niven's pilot must go to the afterlife, to balance the celestial books; he refuses, because the whole mess was none of his fault, and he now has a vital reason to live. There's yet another complication, which the movie conveys ever-so-subtly: Is Niven's character actually seeing angels, living in time-warps, seeing and smelling and hearing exotic phenomena, or are all these hallucinations experienced by one who has walked away from an accident with neural abnormalities akin to epilepsy? Ingeniously, the film remains to its end open to either interpretation.A synopsis of the plot cannot do justice to the film's delights: the actors’ contrastive, alternately straightforward and over-the-top performances; the ingenious camera work of Jack Cardiff (who, following Powell's strict instructions, inverted expectations by filming the heavenly sequences in arresting monochrome and earthly episodes in eye-popping Technicolor), the fantastical production design, and Powell's uncanny knack for knowing just where to put the camera, shoot, then cut. The Criterion edition justifies its slightly high price, with informative commentary offered by Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker (Powell's widow and an ace film editor herself), and a cadre of artists from Lucasfilms who hold this film in awe; archival interviews of Powell and Cardiff; stunning demonstrations of how gorgeous the restoration of this film now is; and much more. In both ambition and technique virtually all of The Archers' films were far ahead of their time, none more so than this one. Perhaps only now, with the perspective of hindsight, we can begin truly to appreciate them. I cannot recall reading Rod Serling's reference to this film, but it is inconceivable that he didn't know of it and, thirteen years later, channel onto CBS television Powell’s commentary on the ghastliness of war, his deep plunge into rollicking imagination, and, most of all, this movie’s tender, dauntless humanism.Because it is a movie that you will almost surely want to see more than once—and must do so, to pick up the unrecognized cherries on a first viewing—I strongly encourage its purchase while still available.