film it resembles, but let down by trendy and unworthy presenta- tion. It would be interesting if, someday, the producers would sanction a “remix” edit to deliver a balls-out action film in which the stuntwork could actually be seen and appreciated.
20th Century Fox’s 50GB dual layer Blu-ray presentation of the Metro Goldwyn Mayer feature is acceptable, though less dy- namic than the stellar CASINO ROYALE presentation and not especially remarkable in terms of rear-channel activity. The disc offers 5.1 mixes in English, Span- ish, French and Portuguese, and subtitles in Spanish, Cantonese, Portuguese, Korean and Manda- rin. The QUANTUM extras are all of a “first issue” nature, meaning your usual ephemera (trailers, music video) and a brace of pro- duction featurettes, including the 25m “Bond on Location” and six shorter, more specialized promo pieces all running about 5m. An assortment of “Crew Files” pro- files originally appearing on the film’s website are also included, introduced by producer Michael G. Wilson. Unexceptional, but rest assured the two-disc gouge with director’s commentary and improved extras is bound to follow in a year or two.
THE FILMS OF MICHAEL POWELL
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (107m 7s) AGE OF CONSENT (106m 24s) 1946/1969, Sony, $24.96, DVD By Michael Barrett
This set pairs a great popular success of 1940s fantasy with a widely unseen film about beauty, sex and art. After J. Arthur Rank’s gong, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH begins with the target logo for the Archers (the writ- ing, producing and directing team of Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger) shading from black and white to glorious color, the manner in which the film to follow will distinguish the lushness of life from the stark absolutes of death.
In lush Technicolor, squadron leader Peter Carter (David Niven), an RAF pilot in the final days of WWII, bails out of his plane be- fore it crashes. He lands in the ocean and awakens unharmed on a beach, where at first he as- sumes he’s in Heaven and asks directions of a faunish naked shepherd playing a flute. Com- pleting his miracle, he runs into June (Kim Hunter), the WAC who talked him through what he as- sumed to be the last minutes of his life over the radio, and they begin a delirious sylvan interlude. Because of Carter’s headaches, vision problems, and hallucina- tions, June consults Dr. Reeves (Roger Livesey), who is intro- duced surveying his quaint Can- terbury-ish village via camera obscura, a means of vision that’s true yet fancifully distorted, even inverted. He diagnoses Carter’s brain injury, which requires an operation, and he interprets Carter’s ongoing fantasies as psy- chotic projections that must be entered into and resolved. So much for realism. Mean- while, a parallel fantasy narrative is set in a black-and-white vision of Heaven as a bureaucracy in the manner of LILIOM and HERE COMES MR. JORDAN. Reflecting wartime exigencies on Earth, briskly efficient women are run- ning the show. Due to the error of Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), a foppish aristocrat who lost his head during the French Revolu- tion, Carter missed his pick-up. Dispatched to correct the situa- tion, 71 returns to Earth’s lush colors, as marked by the transi- tion on a close-up of his rose and his famous remark “One is starved for Technicolor up there.”
(As Ian Christie points out in his commentary, the line is partly looped; Goring actually said “One is starved for color up there.”) To entice Carter to come along and die quietly, 71 keeps offering him a game of chess— an idea developed by Ingmar Bergman in THE SEVENTH SEAL, whether he saw this pic- ture or not. Instead, Carter files an appeal which will turn on Heaven’s negligence and the question of whether his belated love for June in the summer of his life takes precedence over prior claims. The case goes to trial.
Winding up in a courtroom is generally fatal to drama. Even Perry Mason knew the true func- tion of a court is to unmask a killer, not to deliver speeches. Christie notes that this sequence engages contemporary argu- ments on Britain and America’s postwar relations, which this film allegorizes. If this segment is the draggiest, not least due to the bloviations of the prosecutor (Raymond Massey), the film never once loses its strangeness, humor and audacity. By the way, this sequence has the only no- table defect in a print otherwise marvelously rich and sharp: fluc- tuations in the white around close-ups of the speakers’ heads aren’t due to the shifting light ef- fects. Fortunately, the climax gets out of the celestial court for another lovely coup de cinema on the Stairway to Heaven (the film’s US title), which bridges our world (or reality) and the next (or fantasy), and neatly summarizes the verdict with a quotation from Sir Walter Scott.
Here is a movie made one year after the end of WWII and without a trace of jingoism or anti-German sentiment (though it doesn’t extend to Germans in Heaven). The opening God’s- eye-view seems grave about a
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