Reeling Backward: "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946)

I love the idea of "A Matter of Life and Death." It's the movie they actually made I'm not wild about.

David Niven plays a British bomber pilot who was supposed to die, but files an appeal in the court of heaven for more time. Stories of this kind are pretty familiar, from "A Guy Named Joe" to "Heaven Can Wait" to "Always." Even Albert Brooks' "Defending Your Life" -- a criminally underrated film, in my humble opinion -- contains similar notes about an orderly afterlife, complete with a celestial, fallible bureaucracy and innocent souls striving against its capricious strictures.

It's a tantalizing notion, which is probably while filmmakers keep returning to it.

But this well-regarded film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger -- the writing/directing team better known as The Archers -- is a daffy, dippy rendering that ends up defending True Love as its central theme. The big court trial in heaven, which was what made me interested in seeing the movie in the first place, is a disappointing and bizarre affair in which British and American ideals are weighed against each other.

Niven plays Squadron Leader Peter Carter, a 27-year-old budding poet who knows he's going to die. As he pilots his flaming wreck of a plane back across the Chanel, with all of his crew dead or bailed out, he speaks to an American girl on the radio. In these few minutes of insistent chatter -- in which Peter does almost all of the talking, I might add -- we're to believe they formed a lifelong bond that cannot be broken.

The official story is that Peter's angel, otherwise known as Conductor 71 -- a foppish French Revolution-era aristocrat played by Marius Goring -- lost him in the fog and failed to transport him to heaven. As a result, Peter ends up alive on the beach, where he comes across a girl riding a bicycle and lo! It's June (Kim Hunter), the gal he fell in love with over the phone.

Conductor 71 appears 20 hours after the oversight to collect his charge, but Peter objects on the grounds that he fell in love as a result of a heavenly mistake. The conductor agrees to file his appeal up the chain of command.

The military medical staff thinks Peter's gone bonkers, of course, led by an unctuous doctor named Frank Reeves, played by Roger Livesey. Frank humors Peter's story, determining he needs a brain operation or he'll die. On the way to the hospital, Frank is killed in a motorcycle accident during a violent storm, which conveniently allows him to be appointed Peter's counsel for the trial.

The metaphysics of the story are beyond silly. An angel can't find his soul because of fog? Pretty shoddy work for divine beings. I also found silly the trick of Conductor 71 stopping time whenever he's on earth, allowing him to do things like plucking a tear from June's cheek to use at the trial.

What I really couldn't stand, though, was the mawkish idea that two people can fall irrevocably in love in a matter of hours. And that this would be the entire basis upon which Peter's case stands. He can't leave Earth because he loves a woman? What about the millions of women (and men) who lost their true love during the war? Don't they get an appeal?

The actual trial is a just plain weird affair. The prosecution is taken up by a Boston patriot who died during the American Revolution, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey). His arguments are based entirely around his hatred of the English, referring to the many nations around the globe who have suffered in wars of the British empire. His pride veers beyond American exceptionalism into outright bigotry and Anglophobia.

"A Matter of Life and Death" still stands for its excellent cinematography and special effects. The Archers used Technicolor for the earthbound scenes, while the heavenly sequences are in a twinkling black-and-white -- essentially a reverse of the technique used in "The Wizard of Oz." The film was titled "Stairway to Heaven" for its American release, a reference to the stunning image of Peter and his conductor riding a massive escalator up into the sky.

Although it's undeniably a great-looking film, I just found "A Matter of Life and Death" to be too harebrained to take seriously as a piece of important cinema. I was astonished to learn via the film's Wikipedia page that it was named the second most important British film ever in a 2004 magazine survey of critics.

All I can say is they must have also suffered a conk on the head, resulting in overly ambitious delusions.

1.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940)

I'm not normally the type of critic who insists on forcing political correctness upon films. For example, I think the stink conservatives have raised about "Avatar" is (mostly) bunk. But watching 1940's "The Thief of Bagdad," I couldn't help but notice some troubling trends when it comes to casting.

On the whole, the film does pretty well in depicting Arab and African peoples. There are lots of shots of faces in the crowd, men at toil, etc. So one would be hard-pressed to say Middle Eastern folk are not to be found in a story set in Arabia.

But looking over the principal cast list, there's nary a native among them.

Most of the leads are played by English actors: Ahmad (John Justin), the prince and ostensible hero; the Princess (June Duprez) he loves; her father the Sultan (Miles Malleson); and the wise old king/prophet (Morton Selten).

The villain Jaffar is played by the great German actor Conrad Veidt. The djinn role was handled by Rex Ingram, an African-American. And Abu -- who starts out as Ahmad's sidekick but eventually occupies the center of the story -- was played by Sabu, an Indian.

Western cinema has an enduring and troubling tradition of casting Caucasians as Arab, Latino and even African characters. Heck, the forthcoming "Prince of Persia" movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal.

But the fact that this English production appears to lack an Arab in a single speaking role does leave an unpleasant tinge.

The other thing that struck me watching this movie is its intended audience. Nowadays, studios tend to delineate their productions into specific targets: Adult dramas, romantic comedies, gross-out comedies, etc. Seen today, "Thief" seems very much like a children's film. In its day, though, it was viewed as a rousing adventure story for the whole family.

I liked it well enough, although the special effects (which won an Oscar) haven't aged very well. I'm thinking particularly of the djinn's flying sequences, which all seem to feature a motionless puppet. Even more embarrassing is the scene where Abu seeks out the All-Seeing Eye and is trapped in the web of a giant spider. The arachnid literally looks like a child's toy danging from a clearly visible string.

The story is based on "The Book of a Thousand and One Nights," which has spawned countless other cinematic versions, including a Douglas Fairbanks Sr. 1924 silent version.

Disney's 1992 animated film "Aladdin" draws particularly heavily from the 1940 movie. The name and look of Jaffar as an imperious figure cloaked in black was very similar to Veidt's portrayal. The brightly colored costume and childlike demeanor of the Sultan is virtually a straight copy. (Although the cartoon sultan doesn't get assassinated by a blue chick with multiple arms.)

Curiously, in most versions of the story the thief and the prince are the same character, although 1940's "Thief" splits them into two different people. Justin's Ahmad is frankly an uninteresting drip, and the romance with the princess is similarly drab. The filmmakers wisely keep its screen time to a minimum to concentrate on the adventure.

Ingram makes a real impression as the thunderous djinn, whose first impulse upon being released from his bottle after 2,000 years is to kill the one who freed him. Abu outsmarts him, though, receiving the requisite three wishes in return. Ingram, who also played Jim in the previous year's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," had a long career in film and TV.

Although it hasn't worn its 70 years well, "The Thief of Bagdad" remains a remarkable film, one that set the bar for many subsequent adventure tales -- even ones that included Arab actors.

3 stars