It is May 1945 and night has fallen across Europe. The world is at war, cities are aflame and a Lancaster bomber is falling from the sky. Inside the burning cockpit, squadron leader Peter Carter gives his name and age then outlines his politics. “Conservative by nature,” he says. “Labour by experience.” Played by David Niven, the hero of A Matter of Life and Death is your emblematic Englishman – in that he is a muddle. He is trad and prog, romantic and practical, and amiably optimistic even in the teeth of disaster (and perhaps then most of all). He is describing himself as the plane goes down. By proxy, he is describing the film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, too.
All great films are essentially mongrels, created by people from different backgrounds and accommodating sometimes duelling sensibilities. Few, though, are as jumbled and confounding as the movies made by Powell and Pressburger, also known as the Archers (after their production company), with their mix of stiff-upper-lipped Englishness, Albion mysticism and mittel-European sophistication. I have loved these dramas for years, sometimes in spite of their old-school politics and, more recently, precisely because of them. Films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death are patriotic, soul-stirring and gently conservative. These days – perversely – that is what makes them sing.
