Night Over Europe
Now Playing: Mirah--"Make It Hot"
"Any resemblance to any other world known or unknown is purely coincidental."

"This is the universe. Big, isn't it?"

A movie that begins that way--a printed disclaimer and a voiceover narration--will very likely be something special, and so this one was. A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking movies I've ever seen, one that saw me choked up in awestruck bemusement about five minutes after it ended. Filmed by "The Archers," Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Matter starts with an unforgettably enthralling and hypnotic nine-minute opening sequence. Towards the end of the Second World War, British bomber pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) makes contact with American radio operator June (Kim Hunter), and the two fall in love over the air as Peter's crippled Lancaster prepares to crash. Preferring death by falling to death by fire, Peter jumps from his plane--landing safely and unscathed on the seashore, and meeting June in the flesh soon afterward. This miracle results from a heavenly clerical error, and Peter has to prove in a celestial court that the blossoming love between himself and June entitles him to go on living.

What a flick. The acting is uniformly excellent, especially Niven and Hunter, along with Roger Livesey as their friend Dr. Reeves and Marius Goring as "Conductor 71," the Revolutionary-era French fop whose mistake sets the plot in motion. It's impossible, in a way, to adequately describe Matter to people who haven't seen it, and my views will likely seem inadequate to those who have. It accomplishes the difficult task of telling a profoundly humanistic fable while touching on subsidiary themes (such as the relationship between Britain and the United States) that should seem forced or unnatural, but which somehow work. And that's setting aside the set design, direction, and cinematography, the latter courtesy of the legendary Jack Cardiff. Heaven, in Powell and Pressburger's view, appears as a divine transit hub that fits with the utilitarian, military atmosphere familiar to the main characters, living or dead. The earthly scenes are in color while heaven is presented in monochrome--black and white with a slight color tint. All these factors combine with the unorthodox, personal direction to produce a timeless feel--Matter feels a lot more contemporary than 1946, with gruesome shots of the dead (with their eyes open, no less) and all sorts of intimate, pleasantly jarring touches. In the end, I suspect Powell and Pressburger were trying to say, "this is the sort of thing we were fighting for." "Love conquers all" is a pretty jaded concept when it comes to the cinema, but Powell and Pressburger give it a brilliantly romantic yet clear-eyed spin that makes one want to cry but leaves one too busy furiously thinking to do so.

The Quatermass X-Periment (1955), a more orthodox "Halloween" flick, somehow managed not to suffer in comparison. The tense and relatively realistic tale of a mysterious force trying to take over the Earth, it's perfectly reviewed over at British Horror Films. Seriously--Chris said practically everything I wanted to say already, with two exceptions. After watching Matter, I thought it a pity that Roger Livesey wasn't cast as cranky British rocketry x-pert (hey, this is fun!) Bernard Quatermass, leaving the role open for... wait for it... Brian Donlevy!! Maybe the filmmakers (including writer and Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale) felt the audience would be more receptive to a cautionary tale of technology gone berserk if the main scientist guy was a whiny, sneering dipso jackass. At one point, Quatermass--okay, screw that, Donlevy--says, "I'm a scientist, not a fortune-teller who predicts what will happen!" I then considered myself free to believe that he could have been the kind of fortune-teller who shaves kittens and blows glass for "kicks," but I didn't take it too far.

Happy All Saints'!