One of my top ten films of all time.
A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is a film by the British writer-director-producer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The original title in the U.S. was Stairway to Heaven, which was derived from the film’s most prominent special effect: a broad escalator linking the other world and Earth.
Returning to England from a bombing run in May 1945, flyer Peter Carter’s plane is damaged and his parachute ripped to shreds. He has his crew bail out safely, but figures it is curtains for himself. He gets on the radio, and talks to June, a young American woman working for the RAF, and they are quite moved by each other’s voices. Then he jumps, preferring this to burning up with his plane. He wakes up in the surf. It was his time to die, but there was a mixup in heaven.
They couldn’t find him in all that fog. By the time his “Conductor” catches up with him 20 hours later, Peter and June have met and fallen in love. This changes everything, and since it happened through no fault of his own, Peter figures that heaven owes him a second chance. Heaven agrees to a trial to decide his fate.
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.
The films opening line :
A celestial voice booms out. “This is the universe. Big, isn’t it.” And so begins A Matter of Life and Death.
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