A Film Canon

In their most ambitious film to date, Powell and Pressburger return to Technicolour, but foreground it with a new intensity, as if extrapolating their narrative from it, rather than vice versa. As a result, that narrative is lurid, and even slightly vertiginous, in its scope, incorporating the entire physical Universe, the pantheon of Western (and particularly English) intellectuals, and the history of democracy into the trial of WWII pilot Peter Carter (David Niven), who, upon being forced to bail out of a burning plane without a parachute, addresses his (supposedly) last conversation to June (Kim Hunter), an AV operator, only to miss his conducting angel (Marcus Goring) in a thick fog, and so fall back into a life - and romance - that he has technically departed. That said, this hyperbolic scope doesn't preclude the duo's taste for English minutiae, which is more pronounced than ever before, tempering Carter's visions with a cool, detached intelligence encapsulated in the figure of Dr. Reeves (Roger Livesey), a neurologist who appoints himself his advocate: "Nothing he invents is entirely fantastic - it's invention, but logical invention." In fact, despite various discursive asides on the differences between French, American and English democracy (all of which come out in favour of the latter), as well as, more implicitly, the contemporary English political situation, the ultimate result is to imbue these minutiae with all the wondrousness of the cosmos against which they supposedly diminish. Hence the astonishing decision to shoot the firmament in black and white, and England in Technicolour, making the latter appear like nothing so much as "a series of highly organised hallucinations, comparable to a direct sense of life"; or, alternatively, allowing it to replace Heaven itself in paradisial splendour, most beautifully in the abstracted, other- worldy beach where Carter washes up. From this perspective, the various (glaring) coincidences and contrivances are softened by virtue of being mere instances of the curvaceous, all-encompassing lens - analogous to Dr. Reeves' camera obscura, or even the point-of-view shot from Carter as he succumbs to the anaesthetic that will transport him into the ether - required to imbue England with such cosmic significance, while the subsidiary interest in Americana provides another defamiliarising co-ordinate, most poetically in an American nurses' rehearsal of a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.