Film Notes: A Matter Of Life And Death

A Matter Of Life And Death (1946) film notes by Tova Gannana for our Enchanted Evenings: The Boundless Cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger series, running September to November 2024 at SIFF Cinema Egyptian. Follow Tova on Instagram: @tovagannana

The series is presented by The British Film Institute, SIFF, and Greg Olson Productions. Passes and tickets available now.

Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey) loves June, a radio operator stationed at a US Army Air Force base in Leewood, an English coastal city. Dr. Frank is burly with a ginger goatee. He dresses for the rain in a black leather trench coat and skull cap. He’s a messenger on a motorcycle. He plays tennis with a brandy in hand. He watches the village where he practices medicine from inside his office. He diagnoses his patients through touch and talk. He faces whatever comes his way with humor. His face is never worried, his instinct never still. He’s who you would want on your council: He listens and believes. June, with her red lips and brunette curls, is brave on her two-way radio, guiding British pilots. Born an ocean away in Boston, her accent and attitude give her leverage. She’s on American time, which is the future, where 1945 war-torn refugees wanted to be.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is a film about asking for more time, for ourselves and for the ones we love. We think of time as being something we can slip in and out of – “in the nick of time”; “found out just in time”; “ahead of our time” – as though time is an emotion, susceptible
to our whims.

June loves Dr. Frank, but as a friend. She falls in love with Squadron Leader Peter David Carter (David Niven) while he flies a doomed aircraft. The rest of his crew are dead. “Are you receiving me?” June asks from earth. Believing he has little time left, Peter recites from Andrew Marvell’s poem To A Coy Mistress: But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. As he adds his own pun, “Andy Marvell, what a marvel,” June persists, “Are you receiving me?”

We’re preoccupied with time: in songs, “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone”; in art, melting clocks; in dining, turning tables in a restaurant; in medicine, miracle cures. Then we have the idea of living on borrowed time, having cheated time by not dying when your number comes up. There’s time in this world, but what about in the next? We’re bound by gravity here on earth, but not in space. Peter jumps from his burning plane without a parachute. He wakes up having been washed ashore, thinking he’s in the afterlife. A shepherd points him toward June, who’s riding her bike home from her base. This is how June and Peter meet on land, but it was while Peter was in the sky that they fell in love. How could he have survived his fall?

There’s order in the universe: If we get cut, we bleed. In A Matter of Life and Death, we’re shown what comes after, and it’s not God and angels, but rather more human beings and bureaucracy. June and Dr. Frank’s world is in Technicolor; the other world pulling Peter is in black and white. Peter was supposed to have gone the way of his crew, but as Conductor 71 (Marius Goring) explains, “Your time was up, but I missed you because of your ridiculous English climate.” Peter is now in limbo: He must prove his case in heavenly court, of why he should be allowed more time on earth. His answer is June.

Is Conductor 71 a hallucination of Peter’s? June worries for Peter’s sanity. Dr. Frank believes that Peter has brain damage from an earlier concussion and must be operated on. He tells another surgeon, “He’s had many talks with this heavenly messenger – hallucinations of course – but you never saw such an imagination. I’ve been taking tips on the other world, laws, system, architecture. Here’s an interesting point: He never steps outside the limit of his own imagination. Nothing he invents is entirely fantastic: It’s invention, but logical invention. And the keystone to his invention is that the trial takes place tonight. He must win or lose his case tonight. And that’s why I think we ought to operate tonight.” When Peter was on the radio with June and believed he was about to die, he told her, “You’re life, June, and I’m leaving you.” They’d never met, yet this was their moment.

When Conductor 71 appears before Peter, the world around him freezes. June and Dr. Frank, are like a stopped clock, their bodies in mid-motion. “We’re talking in space, not in time,” Conductor 71 says to Peter. “After all, what is time?” Space is infinite, like Marvell’s desert of eternity. Heaven for Peter is having a lifetime with June. Dr. Frank is as much a conductor as a doctor. “What do the books say, Doctor?” June asks him. “I see a dark stranger in his life,” he tells her. The other surgeons and nurses are in white, whereas Dr. Frank is in black, riding his motorcycle through the rain like the Angel of Death, only it is his own death that he brings forth due to his courage, his faithfulness to his practice and to June. Dr. Frank is willing to take Peter’s place in the afterlife. He is his own dark stranger, as he gets involved, he takes a risk, and he shows neither fear nor regret.

Dr. Frank loves June. “Ah here’s June. Here she comes. She walks in beauty like the night. Only she’s cycling and the sun’s out. Nice girl. Worth a handful of ambassadors in Leewood anyway.” Peter survives his fall from the sky, but Dr. Frank doesn’t survive his accident on the road: It’s a brick wall in this world, and an escalator ascending in the next.