KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #14: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (aka STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN; wri & dir by Powell & Pressburger, UK)

"One is starved for Technicolor up there!"

For Memorial Day, I thought I would talk about the most Memorial Day kind of movie there is, as it’s about war and dying in battle, but it’s not sad or depressing. Production started on September 2, 1945, the exact day that the war ended, and is a tribute to all of the people who lost their lives in that terrible conflict, while also being about a man who refuses to accept his fate.

A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven) is one of my all-time favourite films, full stop. I don't actually remember the first time I saw it, but it must've been when I was a child, because only the films you see at your most impressionable ages are dug that deep into you as A Matter of Life and Death is into me. It is a part of me, like Les Enfants du Paradis and The Point.

David Niven is an airman in WWII, and his plane is going down. He has no parachute, he is going to die. But before he does, he talks to Kim Stanley over the radio, and in that moment they fall in love, so when he crashes, he doesn't die, because he made that connection, and because Conductor 71 (the Angel in charge of his case) lost him in the fog.

He was supposed to die, but he didn't, which means the books in Heaven are out of balance, and something must be done about it. Should he live and have a new life with Kim Hunter, or should he die as he was supposed to? Only the heavenly court can decide.This is as perfect a movie as is possible, and not at all as soppy as I made it sound.

The Archers movies are never sentimental, romantic, but hard-headed. And it's the kind of movie where when someone dies, it's okay because we know we're going to see them again.The fact that earth is in Technicolor and Heaven is monochrome is so different than what one would expect, but it works perfectly, in that earth is where there is love and life and things change and grow, but Heaven is fixed and steady, beautiful, but cold, like a marble statue.The day after seeing the movie, I suddenly noticed a joke! Raymond Massey plays the heavenly prosecutor, and David Niven's Peter is trying to think of who to defend him. Conductor 71 suggests Lincoln, and Peter says "It's hardly fair to drag him in."It took nearly 24 hours for me to remember that Raymond Massey was famous for playing Lincoln! I looked up the date, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois was released in 1940, so they were definitely making a sly joke that audiences of the time would have gotten. And now you will, too!

This time watching it, I realized that Kim Hunter was born one year before my mother, and the Conductor says that her character, June, would live to be 97. Mom lived to be 94. Mom worked for the American Army in Berlin after the war, June works for the American Army in England near the end of the war. Mom was in love with an American soldier, Ziggy, who died during the war, but not of the war, he died for a different reason, Mom never knew what, probably cancer. June is in love with Peter, a British RAF pilot who is trying to win the right to live, and might die due to brain damage. I am overwhelmed in a way that I never have been before watching this film.

Great movies change as you watch them in different times of you life. But I think, for me, this will always be Mom and Ziggy.

Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog

Kymm’s mother with her WWII boyfriend Ziggy.