Featured Movies
Partners
A Matter of Life and DeathOne of Powell's and Pressburger's most elegant achievements, and Powell's own favourite from his time at the production company Archer's, this is part romance, part surrealist courtroom drama.
Niven is Peter Carter, an RAF pilot (and poet) who bails out of his plane over the Channel. By a clerical error on the part of the angel (Goring) due to escort him to heaven, Peter survives long enough to meet and fall in love with a young US woman (Hunter), with whom he had been in radio contact in his fateful, fatal flight. As his life hangs in the balance, Peter appears before a celestial court to plea for another shot at life, with Massey, an Anglo-hating American revolutionary, prosecuting.
With surface similarities to the same year's It's a Wonderful Life, the film is a richly realized fantasy that reverses the visual conceit of The Wizard of Oz. Here, under the control of Cardiff, a master of Technicolor, the real world is filmed in colour, the dream-world-in-the-sky in monochrome.
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