A Matter of Life and Death

A visual tour-de-force, a marvellous romance, a witty commentary on Anglo-American relationships, and a feverishly imaginative fantasy, A Matter of Life of Death is Powell and Pressburger's masterpiece.

A visual tour-de-force, a marvellous romance, a witty commentary on Anglo-American relationships, and a feverishly imaginative fantasy, A Matter of Life and Death is Powell and Pressburger's masterpiece.

Before plunging into a transformative encounter between an RAF pilot about to crash and the girl answering his Mayday call, the film opens with a brief meditation on... well, the infinite universe. For this stirring story of the pilot's battle for life - and the love of his life - is also one of the great films about time. Alternating between earth and heaven, the script incorporates eternity, the legacy of history, an ordinary human lifespan, the transience of happiness, the fleeting magic of a moment, and time stopped still - all eloquently evoked by expert play with pace and chronology. With heart-stoppingly beautiful images, the film embraces both the dizzy joys of being alive and the sad inevitability of death with such a sure sense of poetry and drama that by the time it ends, one still feels it has only just begun.

Directed by:

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

Cast:

David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Marius Goring, Raymond Massey

Country:

UK

Year:

1946

Running time:

104min

Certificate:

U