A Matter of Life and Death

(This isn't what I originally planned for my second blog post but what I intended to write wasn't working so I scrapped it and wrote this instead. It was written as it occurred to me and I haven't edited it except for taking a out a large section in the middle. Please bear with me, I'll hope to get better at this. And now Dear reader, proceed with caution)

Don't worry this isn't going to be as serious as the title sounds. But it is about something that is a big part of my life. Films and more specifically the films of The Archers.

The Archers was the name of the The British film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The first film of theirs I remember seeing was A Matter of Life and Death (AMOLAD) aka Stairway to Heaven in the USA. This would have been in the early 1970's on television, probably as a Saturday afternoon matinee on BBC2 when they still showed black and white films during the day on TV. (It's only half B/W though).
When I say I remember it, it wasn't the story that stayed with me (although I enjoyed, it was a bit too difficult for the 7 year old me to fully understand) it was the visual images.

If you haven't seen it (and you really should have)*EDIT* At this point I originally had written a long and rambling synopsis of the film. Instead and to avoid spoilers, here's the wikipedia entry.

The film is set both on Earth and in Heaven and is in both black and white and Technicolor and it was this that I remembered most on this first viewing. We had only just got a colour TV (I know, we were poor in them days, but happy) and the colour was so vivid. But in a reversal of The Wizard of Oz, Earth was in colour and and the "fantasy" world, black and white.

Images that stuck in my mind were the table tennis game frozen in time. A naked boy with a goat, playing a flute in the sand dunes. A motorbike racing through a rainy windswept night. The giant moving staircase to Heaven. Heaven itself. A time frozen tear on a rose.

I'd seen David Niven before as Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days and but this was the first time I'd seen Kim Hunter and I think I fell a little bit in love with her. If you don't think you know her, you probably do, she was the main female ape in The Planet of the Apes, and she still managed to look beautiful as a chimpanzee.

The other main part is Dr. Reeves played by the sadly underrated actor Roger Livesey, who earlier had a career defining role as the eponymous Colonel in The Archers' "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp". I wanted to grow up to be this man or at least have him as a uncle.

A few years later there was a season of The Archers films on, again, BBC2, and this is where I discovered their other great films "I Know Where I'm Going", "The Red Shoes", "Blimp" and "Black Narcissus". Television, in particular the BBC, was my film school in those days, showing seasons of films from directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks and one of my favourites Preston Sturges. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill series on early silent films and the works of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd I also lapped up. But it was The Archers that fascinated me most.

In my local library I found a copy of Ian Chistie's book on The Archers "Arrows of Desire" and devoured it. Next I requested a copy of Michael Powell biography "A Life in Movies - An Autobiography" and then anything else a could get hold of about them. This was the early days of VHS in UK and I remember as soon as I started work saving up to buy our family's first video recorder, a Grundig that cost over £400, and religiously recorded all the Archers films when they were shown on TV. This was also the case for Hitchcock and the Ealing comedies and of course, Monty Python reruns. I only got rid of them a few years ago, long after a had them on DVD. My name is Philip and I am a nerd. I shall be buying them all again on Blueray soon no doubt.

I finally saw AMOLAD in the cinema in the mid to late 80's at the Dukes cinema in Lancaster. By this time I had seen it many times but like all great films I saw something different in it each time, the film might not change but as we grow older we do and each time we can take something else from it.

"A Matter of Life and Death" isn't my favorite film, I could never chose. It's not even my favorite Archers film, that honor is reserved for "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp". But it is the one I think of most fondly as it opened my eyes to a world of cinema.
It's a film that has drama, romance , comedy, a court room battle for a man's life, poetry, a discourse on Anglo-American relations, brain surgery, a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night's Dream by American servicemen. Chess and table tennis.
And a young Dickie Attenborough saying his only line "It's heaven, isn't it" Indeed it is!

So if you are ever unlucky enough to meet me in a pub, you now know one of the subjects to avoid as I could bore for England. But don't worry I have many, many more.
I'll leave you with a clip of the opening scene as I go off to watch the DVD again.

Oh, and twitter friends, the screenwriter of The Archers is where my name comes from and about him, more anon.