Sunday, August 14, 2011

Never Mind the Main Chance

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library

A Matter of Life and Death is not my favorite Archer production, but it is the most subversive of their famous films. Anglophilia remains prominent enough in 2011 that wartime British propaganda looks like a coat of polish on an already familiar mythology. None of the names invoked by heavenly counselors in the course of Peter Carter’s trial are unfamiliar, but they are as dull in the context of his celestial dreamscape as they are in a middle-school history class today.

But amid the American-English hokum, the grandstanding and oratory, one thinks back to the opening scene. Peter’s plane is going down, and his last act on earth is to fall in love with a stranger on the other end of his radio transmission. She, in turn, cannot help but fall in love herself. The fire in the cockpit is why Technicolor was invented, and will never be beat: a bloody heart in the sky.

When Peter doesn’t die, and Heaven holds a trial, Peter and June argue that they deserve the time on earth mistakenly allowed them. Heaven disagrees, but we can see immediately that nothing in its clear, cold plane looks anything like the roaring confines of Peter’s Technicolor doom. Heaven is not Heaven, next to love. Like all great love stories, sooner or later, A Matter of Life and Death is about letting go. Peter and June don’t want to, and not even Heaven can blame them. We have too little time as it is.

Powell and Pressburger, patriots both, allow their Allied All-Stars. Heroes through the ages are greeted with lusty cheers by the limitless dead that line Heaven’s halls. But Powell and Pressburger were not fools. They did not see glory in war, only the end of relationships like Peter’s and June’s. And Heaven, whatever it is, could never be finer than that first spark between them.

So there, by a door where Peter’s crew waits for him to die, is a pair of pilots newly dead, in a moment that passes quickly but not unnoticed. One, a mid-west type, looks about Heaven in amazement. “Boy oh boy,” he says. “Home was nothing like this!”

He is followed close behind by a friend, and it is impossible, upon hearing his reply, to not think of every waiting sweetheart and every sunny day, and be glad, above all else, that you are alive.

“Mine was.”