Film Forum

(1946) Back from bombing Germany, RAF flyboy David Niven crashes into the Channel, despite American operator Kim Hunter’s efforts to talk him down – but he isn’t dead yet, since Collector 71 (Marius Goring), a previously beheaded French aristocrat, has missed his scheduled soul pickup due to heavy fog. Asked to make a film promoting Anglo-American goodwill, Powell & Pressburger (The Red Shoes, Tales of Hoffmann, etc.) soared into otherworldly whimsical fantasy, moving from the great Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor-drenched Earthly photography (more dazzling than ever in this new restoration), to a grandiose celestial trial with Raymond Massey as Niven’s snarling prosecutor, in glorious pearly hued black & white. “One is starved for Technicolor up there,” Goring remarks from Earth. 4K DCP restoration. ​Approx. 104 min.

A SONY PICTURES RELEASE.

Restored in 4K by Sony Pictures Entertainment from the original Technicolor 3-strip picture negative. 4K scanning by Cineric, New York; Image restoration by L'Immagine Ritrovata, Bologna; Audio restoration by Deluxe Hollywood; color grading, conform, additional image restoration, DCP creation by Deluxe Culver City.

Read more about the restoration here.

SPEND NEW YEAR’S EVE WITH POWELL, PRESSBURGER, HUNTER AND NIVEN.
Free bubbly for 7:40 and 9:50 ticketholders on Sunday, December 31.

Reviews

“Not only a great movie, but also — thanks to the cinematographer Jack Cardiff — one of the high points of the heyday of Technicolor.” 
– Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times

“AN ASTONISHMENT. Epic and intimate, surveying nothing less than the breadth of creation and the first spark of new love… [Powell and Pressburger] regard death and what follows with a reserved awe, and the film — like all of their best — bursts with tantalizing ideas, surprising connections, suggestive flights of fancy… Remains overwhelmingly powerful, a reminder from across the pond that the strength of America is in its diversity, its capacity for forward thinking and humanistic decency. It’s an ideal to aspire toward, no matter how often this country manages to disappoint.”
– Alan Scherstuhl, The Village Voice

“A ROMANTIC, DARING AND BEAUTIFULLY REALIZED ALLEGORICAL FANTASY – ONE OF THE BEST OF THE POWELL/PRESSBURGER MOVIES.”
– Martin Scorsese

“One of the most audacious films ever made - in its grandiose vision, and in the cozy English way it’s expressed… The special effects show a universe that never existed until this movie was made, and the vision is breathtaking in its originality.”
– Roger Ebert

“It is a film with incredible self-possession, at once a playful miniature of innocent love and grandiose epic.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“A virtuoso opening shot displays Powell’s ambitions: nothing less than a tracking movement across the universe, beginning with a distant galaxy and coming to fix on the cockpit of a British bomber, returning toward Dover from an air raid deep within Germany… Like so many of the films that Powell and Pressburger made together A Matter of Life and Death seems to overflow with ideas. In between international politics and metaphysical speculation, the film even finds room for some cinematic self-referentiality.”
– Dave Kehr, The New York Times