A Matter of Life and Death (1946) on Netflix
PG19461h 44mComedyDramaFantasy
RAF pilot Peter Carter jumps from his burning Lancaster without a parachute after talking by radio with June, an American operator. He wakes on a beach, alive, and heaven wants him back.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb8.0/1028,286 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
On May 2, 1945, Squadron Leader Peter Carter is at the controls of a burning Lancaster over the English Channel, having sent his crew out ahead of him without saying that his own parachute was gone. The only person he can raise on the radio is June, a United States Army Air Forces operator on the English coast. They talk as his plane fails, and he jumps rather than burn. Peter wakes in the surf near Lee Wood, where June, cycling home after her shift, finds him, and the two fall in love. He should have died, but the fog hides him from the messenger sent to bring him across. That messenger now wants him to come along, and Peter asks for an appeal.
Cast
- Betty Potteras Mrs. Tucker
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The escalator to the afterlife was a real machine, nicknamed "Operation Ethel" by the engineers who built it: 106 steps, each 20 feet wide, driven by a 12 horsepower engine, three months to construct and 3,000 pounds to pay for.
- The Other World scenes were shot in three-strip Technicolor but printed without color, giving the monochrome a pearly sheen credited on screen as "Colour and Dye-Monochrome Processed in Technicolor" - the reverse of the trick The Wizard of Oz had used.
- The production waited nine months for film stock and Technicolor cameras, because the US Army had them all out making training films.
- Marius Goring did not want to play Conductor 71 at all; he pushed to play the pilot Peter Carter, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, set on David Niven, told him the Conductor was his only choice or they would offer it to Peter Ustinov.
- Kim Hunter got the part of June on a tip from Alfred Hitchcock, who had used her to read lines from behind the camera during Ingrid Bergman's screen test for Spellbound; Powell and Pressburger had arrived in Hollywood with only Betty Field in mind.
- The film was picked for the first Royal Film Performance ever held, at the Empire Theatre in London on 1 November 1946 with George VI and his wife present, and the evening raised 30,000 pounds for the Cinematograph Trade Benevolent Fund.
- The idea came from a British government department, which wanted a film to ease friction between American servicemen and a British public that called them "overpaid, oversexed and over here"; no government money or say over the plot came with it.
