Michael Powell has a special place in the hearts of British film lovers. Hitchcock went to Hollywood. David Lean was most at home with international epics. But Powell was English through and through, and “Englishness” was one of his favourite subjects, even if much of that came from his Anglophile Hungarian-born writing partner, Emeric Pressburger. Powell’s own English style stands in marked contrast to the prevailing bland realism which characterized the industry around him: he was a florid romantic, with a love for expressionism, for poetry and surrealism.
With Pressburger, during and after World War II, Powell made an unparalleled series of passionate, idiosyncratic, unforgettable British films, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, I Know Where I’m Going, Black Narcissus and A Canterbury Tale. All of them are wonderful. But the most beloved of all is A Matter of Life and Death.
It began life as a commission from the wartime Ministry of Information, which required a film stressing goodwill between the Brits and their American allies. It ended somewhere else, a transatlantic love story framed by an English airman’s morbid neurological fantasy after his plane comes down in the Channel. Peter Carter (David Niven) washes up on Saunton Sands, where he falls in love with an American nurse (Kim Hunter). Guilty that he has cheated death, Peter dreams that he must plead permission to extend his lifespan before the highest court of all, in Heaven. With all the philosophers and poets in history at his disposal, who will he choose for an advocate?
Powell shoots “reality” in vivid, vibrant Technicolor, and Carter’s celestial “episodes” in black and white. Likewise, the film’s temperament encompasses the old school stiff upper lip and something that conjures its fervid opposite.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will be preceded by a 15 minute introductory lecture and feature a book club-style discussion afterwards.
Apr 21: Introduced by William Brown, Assistant Professor of Film, University of British Columbia; Honorary Fellow for the School of Arts, University of Roehampton, London
There are more stunning ideas in this one film, concerning a mistake made in heaven about a WWII pilot who should be dead but isn’t, than the whole of British cinema can usually muster in a decade.
Nick James, Sight & Sound
Bursts with tantalizing ideas, surprising connections, suggestive flights of fancy.
Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter
UK
1946
English
Book Tickets
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Credits
Producer
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Screenwriter
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Cinematography
Jack Cardiff
Editor
Reginald Mills
Original Music
Allan Gray
Production Design
Alfred Junge
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
