A Matter of Life and Death

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (released in the United States as Stairway to Heaven) opened in November 1946 as the inaugural Royal Film Performance, the first British film to be screened in the presence of a member of the Royal Family. It entered the upper tiers of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, and it is one of the most distinctive things British cinema produced in its golden age.

RAF Squadron Leader Peter Carter (David Niven, in the lead that defined his career) bails out of a burning bomber over the English Channel on his last mission, without a parachute, and is somehow alive on the beach the next morning. Heaven's bureaucracy is convinced an administrative error has been made (Carter was supposed to have died) and prepares his appeal before a celestial tribunal. Meanwhile he has fallen in love with the American radio operator (Kim Hunter) whose voice was the last thing he heard before jumping.

Powell and Pressburger inverted the usual fantasy palette, putting Earth in vivid Technicolor and Heaven in monochrome, and the colour photography is some of the most beautiful of the 1940s, the work of Jack Cardiff in his first credit as director of photography. The Ministry of Information commissioned the film as a goodwill gesture toward fraying Anglo-American relations at the close of the war, and the film-makers turned that diplomatic brief into philosophical comedy, with the celestial bureaucracy as a sly mirror of postwar political negotiation. It has aged extraordinarily well, and its celestial escalator is now one of the founding images of British cinema.