A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

A Matter of Life and Death is a 1946 British fantasy-romance film written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and set in England during the Second World War.

Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. With David Niven, Kim Hunter, Robert Coote, Kathleen Byron. A British wartime aviator who cheats death must argue for his life before a celestial court.

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After miraculously surviving a jump from his burning plane, RAF pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) encounters the American radio operator (Kim Hunter) to whom he has just delivered his dying wishes, and, face-to-face on a tranquil English beach, the pair fall in love. When a messenger from the hereafter arrives to correct the bureaucratic error that spared his life, Peter must mount a fierce defense for his right to stay on earth—painted by production designer Alfred Junge and cinematographer Jack Cardiff as a rich Technicolor Eden—climbing a wide staircase to stand trial in a starkly beautiful, black-and-white modernist afterlife. Intended to smooth tensions between the wartime allies Britain and America, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s richly humanistic A Matter of Life and Death traverses time and space to make a case for the transcendent value of love.

A British wartime aviator who cheats death must argue for his life before a celestial court.

Powell and Pressburger’s wartime drama, starring David Niven as an erroneously alive bomber pilot, is visually extraordinary and politically topical.

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s audacious Technicolor fantasy, WWII airman David Niven finds himself summoned to heaven after surviving a plane crash that should have killed him.