Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Best British Film Ever - Part Nine

9. Optimism and Ideals

A Matter of Life and Death was made at a time when the war was all but over and people were starting to think about the future once more. What sort of a world did they want to build? What had they been fighting for? There was a general sense that what came next would have to give meaning to the terrible destruction which had dominated people’s lives for so long. The film embodies this yearning for a better world to come, but also gives that longing a wider and more expansive historical, cultural and philosophical context. This optimistic outlook is clearly laid out in the philosophical to and fro of the celestial courtroom scene. Abraham Farlan, the American revolutionary soldier who is chosen as the prosecution witness, is enmired in the historical hatreds of a past which for him has become set in stone, ineradicable. His world has been shaped by war and has remained rigidly formed by the experience of those violent, disruptive times. He argues for cultural separatism, for people to remain, either literally or figuratively, on their own islands. For him, people are the product of their culture and the history (and climate!) which has created it, an almost Calvinist espousal of predetermination which definitely puts free will on the backburner (or the rear gas-ring if we want to play his game of cultural exclusivity). These arguments are seriously flawed by the undying flame of burning hatred which lies behind them and for which they act as mere rationalisations.

To his bitter cynicism and high nationalist rhetoric, speeches which had been all to familiar to people in recent years, Dr Reeves eventually offers a more personal approach. His ‘only real piece of evidence’, June’s tear, represents the emotional core of a new world, building from personal connections over the rubble of nationalist clashes. Love, truth and friendship, ‘those qualities alone can build a new world today and must build one tomorrow’ Dr Reeves states in summary of his case, a sense of urgency giving force to his voice. Peter and June’s love has become emblematic of a utopian future in which people matter above all. America is taken as an example, as if to confound Abraham Farlan by agreeing with his own nationalist fervour. Dr Reeves’ request for a new jury is one which is made up of representatives of the new America with its high ideals of a melting pot of all nationalities and races mixing together to recreate themselves afresh. The resentments of Imperial subjects are replaced by the varied citizenry of a new society in which they are active participants. This is a prescient admission (and one coming from a director/writing team who come from the conservative end of English Romanticism) that the days of Empire are over. A new model is required. That model needs to be built on the highest principles, the power which drives people’s most noble thoughts and deeds. It is the power that connected Peter and June in the face of mortality and which was made physically manifest in a frozen tear balanced between rose petals. It always was and it always will be.

The Film of Val Lewton - Part Seven

The Leopard Man - part two

The film is structured around three deaths. These are occasioned by the search to satisfy three basic human needs: Food, love and money. As ever with Lewton, life carries with it the shadow of death. The Leopard Man illustrates how this can exert an overpowering fascination. The three women who die are at differing stages of life. Theresa Delgado is a young girl, Consuela is just beginning to approach the first bloom of maturity, and Clo-Clo is a mature woman in command of herself and at ease in her surroundings. Women are often presented as victims in horror films, of course, but here you sense that they are symbolic of different aspects of the life force, succumbing to an almost impersonal embodiment of the opposed force of death (Thanatos, as Freud would have it). This is death in a masculine guise and is also representative of historical and religious forces of conquest and the violent imposition of power.

The scene in which Theresa meets her death is perhaps the most celebrated of the film. It is another of Lewton and Tourneur’s sustained exercises in atmosphere. Theresa’s mother sends her daughter out into the night for cornmeal for tortillas out of a sense of pride – she doesn’t want to be seen to poor in front of guests. Theresa’s evident fear is dismissed out of hand. She is too late for the local shop, the proprietor of which refuses to unlock the door for her because it would be too much trouble for her. These are the small gestures creating the forks in the path which determine someone’s fate. If she had taken the trouble to open up the door for her, Theresa wouldn’t have had to continue over the arroyo to the more distant store, as she does. The arroyo itself is an ominous southern gothic landscape, with a dry desert wind blowing through the dark underpass of the concrete railway bridge which spans the dusty gulch. This imposition of the resolutely artificial on the natural is echoed in the store, where Theresa admires the mechanical toy birds in their cage. The storekeeper has evidently known her since she was a little girl, and the sense of community which this once more underlines is furthered by his insistence on giving her credit, since ‘the poor don’t cheat one another; we’re poor together’.

As she makes the trip back through the arroyo and into the dark shadows beneath the bridge, the wind has died down and the sound of water dripping into the narrow channel only serves to amplify the silence. We see the twin points of light which are the leopard’s eyes. The Lewton ‘bus’ on this occasion is a train, which roars overhead, throwing its light onto the concrete in epileptic flashes. Whereas the original ‘bus’ which arrived at the end of the first nightwalk scene in Cat People (see previous post) served both as a mechanical jolt and a signal that the danger was over, here the intrusion of loud modernity into the wilderness serves to frighten the leopard and make it leap into aggressive action. As Charlie had said of his creature in criticising the police tactics of trying to drive it out with noise, ‘they don’t want to hurt you, but if you scare them, they go crazy’. Theresa runs, dropping the cornmeal which spills out onto the ground. We hear her pounding at the door, but her mother won’t let her in, determined to chastise her for taking so long. When we hear the thud of a body against the door and a scream suddenly cut short by animalistic snarls, we know that it is too late. The blood which flows in a stream under the door, echoing the thin trickle of water beneath the bridge, pools and spreads out in the cracks of the floor paving, following a rigorous path as if this has all been pre-determined by fate.



The inquest is held in a glass-fronted showroom on the main street, and we first see the events through this window, which is in the process of being cleaned. The following scene will make the situation more transparent, it is implied. Theresa’ s young brother makes leopard shadows against the wall. Death is simply not a reality for him yet. Kiki gives a contribution for the funeral to a nun who is in attendance. The church as a convenient outlet for the expiation of guilt. Jerry’s solution is also to ‘slip them a few bucks’, an economic reaction to culpability which elides deeper involvement. It is left to Chief Robles to comfort the family. He is like a secular priest, a humane man who cares about the people in his community. Jerry’s lack of involvement is conversely highlighted when he turns down the offer to take part in a posse to hunt for the leopard, making ‘flip talk’, as Kiki will later refer to it, about being a tenderfoot. Chief Robles pointedly tells Gailbraith that ‘no-one blames you’ after his evident distress whilst Jerry is told ‘no one holds you legally responsible’. Merely morally. These judgements will be reversed by the end of the film. As the family walks down the street, Jerry moves aside. He is apart, distanced from the community which is united in mourning.

The next scene juxtaposes the image of the nun from the inquest with a momentarily still tableau of the gypsy fortune teller in Marian pose, head tilted contemplatively to one side, head covered with a veil. The piety of this icon is immediately sullied when she pulls up her everpresent cigarette to her lips. The introduction of such a cheekily profane image makes a point about the way that spiritual solace can be found in the most unlikely of places, however. It is also a reminder that older religious traditions exist from which Catholicism has drawn in order to fulfil the need for a focus of female power. Clo-Clo goes to see the gypsy for more than a mere card reading. Chief Robles is a figure who acts as more than just a police chief. His cells become almost monastic when he admits Charlie to them for the night to allow him to work off what he knows is a baseless feeling of guilt. The fortune teller is a wise woman in proletarian guise. She says that Charlie Howe should be allowed to look for the leopard, since he is an Indian. She believes in the old wisdom, knowledge connected to the landscape and the ancient cultural strata with which it is layered. Of those who have superseded and buried the ancient traditions, she is dismissive; ‘men are all fools – they like to make a big show’. The bad card comes up again in her reading for Clo-Clo, after one which has indicated ‘you will meet a rich man and he will give you money’. ‘For what was I born for if not for money’ Clo-Clo declaims. It will in fact be money for which she dies.

The gypsy passes Jerry as she leaves Clo-Clo’s dressing room and throws him a dirty look. It turns out that he did go on that posse after all, where he met Galbraith (a buried but important plot point). He says that they got on, and right until the end, when he and Kiki are about to leave, he is saying that they must keep in touch with him, suggesting an affinity between the two men (and a shared guilt?) At the ‘supper show’ they meet up with him and learn that he is the curator of the local museum, which has ‘interesting exhibits of Indian arts and crafts’. Galbraith was a teacher of zoology, but gave it up for reasons he leaves unstated. This evasiveness suggests a guarded personality and hits at some kind of breakdown or crisis in his life; Something which has led him to withdraw to this remote town and within himself. He seems hesitant and a little distant, aloof and emotionally disconnected from the life surrounding him. He will remain a mysterious character until the end, to himself as much as anyone. It is his horror at discovering an element of his personality which he is unable to suppress which leads him to do what he does.

The second death in the film is once more preceded by Clo-Clo acting as a linking character, meeting with a servant, Rosita, who is on her way to bring flowers to her mistress, Consuela Contrera. The fact that Clo-Clo cannot even afford one flower acts as a striking contrast with the well-off Contrera household. The interior of the house is grand, with a staircase ascending in a sweeping curve. The roses are laid out on Consuela’s bed for her birthday in a fashion which directly parallels the way in which she’ll lay them out on her father’s grave later on. Once again, the notion that death is a seed contained within birth is put forth. ‘I must go to the graveyard. It’s my birthday’, she says. This is reminiscent of the islanders in ‘I Walked With A Zombie’, who weep at a birth and celebrate at a funeral. Rosita has surreptitiously shown Consuela that she has a letter from her lover, which agrees to an arranged rendezvous in the graveyard. The laying of roses on her father’s grave act as an excuse and makes the equation between love and death, for both of which these flowers are now the symbol.

Having been told by the cemetery gatekeeper of the time at which he will close and lock the doors, Consuela, lays flowers on her father’s grave and talks to him of her lover, Raul. She goes to meet him in mourner’s black, waiting in a grove circled with classical columns. At the centre of such a space, suggestive of ancient sacred traditions, the statue of the Virgin with child appears more like Diana, a goddess embodying female power. Raul has not waited, however, only the butts of his cigarettes indicating his former presence. The cigarette butt on the ground will be echoed in the later scene with Clo-Clo meeting what she momentarily thinks may be her lover. The extinguished butt on the ground is the dying out of the light of hope and life.

Consuela sits disconsolately on one of the benches, lost in a world of her own misery. She misses the closing time and when the bell is rung, is lost amongst the pathways of stone and evergreen shrubbery and locked in. We see the small fire outside the gate, the precious and tenuous flames of life, which contrast with the cold moonlit stone inside. As Consuela runs through the evergreens which seem to form the walls of a maze which actively seeks to misdirect her, she passes a statue of what may be St Peter, but which in this context is more resemblant of Pan. And indeed, he exerts his influence, as Consuela begins to panic. Cultures are layered atop one another, never wholly disconnected from what has come before. Traces of the past will always leach through the surface coating to form a palimpsest of myth and symbol. Consuela also comes across a small recess in the wall, a votary or shrine which, in the shadowed night, looks more like an ancient oracular site, like the mouth of the stone face at Delphi; the dark entrance to a dank underworld. The wind has started to blow, as it did during Theresa’s trek across the arroyo, a sign of the immanence of the uncanny. The landscape itself seems to conspire against her. Consuela momentarily connects with the world of the living beyond the cemetery as a passerby promises to return with a ladder, but she is now shut off from it by a barrier of stone, just as the concrete bridge proved to be a boundary between life and death for Theresa. In that case, a ball of tumbleweed blew past in the wind as if hurrying between worlds. Here, nature becomes animate again, a branch bending down as if the trees are reaching out to grasp her. Her screams end the scene as we are spared the sight of her end.



The police are joined by Jerry and Galbraith at the graveyard where Theresa’s body has been discovered. Jerry is sceptical about the nature of the crime, which is being ascribed to the leopard. Galbraith opines that ‘caged animals are unpredictable. They’re like frustrated human beings’. He draws the link between human and animal nature, and between a nature upon which captivity is imposed and one whose confinement is a more complex and at least partially self-created form of repression. Meanwhile, Charlie has been reduced to hawking charms and miracle potions. As he tells Jerry, ‘I can’t make a buck without my leopard’. Jerry has appropriated the economic basis of his living. The effects of a careless act reverberates way beyond its initial impact. As Chief Robles, the film’s moral voice puts it, ‘people who want publicity and don’t mind how they get it...what agony and sorrow they bring to other people’.

Jerry and Charlie accompany Galbraith to his museum. It is more like a mausoleum. Outside, a woman in traditional Indian costume sits adjacent to a postcard rack weaving on a handloom. The two are implicitly equivalent, objects of local colour for the edification of tourists. The woman stands (or sits) in contrast with Charlie, who with his silver belt buckle and felt hat looks like a much more modern native inhabitant of the New Mexican landscape, influenced by subsequent developments. The visitors’ footsteps echo and voices reverberate in the interior of the museum, merely serving to underline the deathly emptiness of the space. Galbraith talks to Charlie, trying to interest him in his heritage by showing him a ceremonial leopard head, but he doesn’t respond. Galbraith shows them his latest exhibit and relates how he went back after the rest of the team had packed up and gone home and dug it up himself. The whole museum has the air of a solitary pursuit in which no-one else is interested. Jerry is voicing his suspicions that a man carried out the latest killing, and Galbraith deflects suspicion onto Charlie, under the guise of levity. The whole museum, curated by an American, is a testament to the disappearance of a culture and the erosion of self-esteem which has led to such neglect. Galbraith now plays upon this to arouse Charlie’s native self-doubt. He is so appalled by the very thought that such impulses might be present inside him that he demands he be confined to jail, something which Robles is happy to do for him in his ‘clerical’ guise, even while emphasising his utter disbelief that Charlie has anything to do with Consuela’s death.

We see Charlie in jail and then hear Clo-Clo’s castanets once more providing the link between scenes and emphasising the connectivity of characters in this community. Clo-Clo now walks down a very different street to that in which we first saw her, however. It is dark and depopulated, with only the police and some delivery men for her to greet. Once more we witness the effect of Jerry and Kiki’s careless act on the community. It has become a street of fear.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Greatest British Film Ever Made - Part 8

8. Romantic Landscapes

When Peter drifts back into consciousness after his parachute-less plunge from the bomber’s cockpit, he finds himself on a wide expanse of sand, with the waves which have washed him ashore creating long, successive overlaps of undulant lines when seen from above. Naturally, he believes himself to be in the afterlife. In fact, he is on Saunton Sands in North Devon, which locals may always have suspected was a gateway to paradise. In a haunting scene, Peter, having divested himself of the more cumbersome of his earthly garments and walked up to the dunes in bare feet, comes across a naked goatherd playing an ethereal melody on his flute (the Phrygian mode?) ‘I always hoped there’d be dogs’, he says, as the boy’s Labrador runs up to see him. The atmosphere of some kind of Elysium is created before a plane roaring overhead shatters the idyll. And yet the feeling remains that such landscapes breathe of a heavenly air, an English Romantic paradise. As Peter runs down the dunes to the boardwalk and greets June as if they were already lovers, we feel that such full-blooded emotions are a natural extension of such wild, elemental surroundings.


They would seem more of an aberration in the cool, distanced spatial order of the monochrome heavenly world above. Trubshaw gamely tries it on with Kathleen Byron’s angelic receptionist during the trial sequence, but you sense that he’s never going to get past first post, and he is soon distracted by the cricket commentary which drives everyone else mad with boredom. The contrast of English Romanticism and heavenly modernist distance is also symbolically shown in the transition of Conductor 71’s rose from black and white into heightened, painterly Technicolor (and later, freighted with June’s precious tear, back again). Conductor 71 is an unabashed romantic in the French mould and will later help Peter’s case in the name of l’amour. His first meeting with Peter takes place in a bower of flowering rhododendrons. At this point, however, he is too concerned with the possible repercussions to his position resulting from his error to allow his mistily sentimental romantic side to take the upper hand, although he does dreamily sigh ‘exquise’ at the sight of June’s frozen form. Nevertheless, Peter senses some sort of affinity when he says, just prior to the Conductor’s departure, ‘you know, I think you’re not a bad chap’.

The English landscape can also be seen from the perspective of Dr Reeves’ hair-raisingly authentic motorcycle rides through the countryside. As his bike threads the lanes bracketed with hedgerows and overhung with oak and beech boughs, we feel the sheer exhilaration of being out in the open air. These English landscapes are contrasted with the European Romantic sublime of heaven, monumental landscapes which inspire awe and even terror and against which human scale is dwarfed. Perhaps an appeal for a more tempered modernism on a human scale is being sought. The kind of modernism which A Matter of Life and Death’s costume designer Hein Heckroth experienced during his time teaching at Dartington Arts College, with its classic 30s white-walled buildings such as High Cross House, designed by William Lescaze, set against the rolling hills of the Dart valley and the wild backdrop of the moor. Modernism and romanticism combined.

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Six

The Leopard Man (1943)



The Leopard Man is not perhaps one of the most successful of the Val Lewton productions, partly because of the unsympathetic nature of the source material, Cornell Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi. Lewton and his writers had previously been given carte blanche within the confines of the lurid titles provided by RKO production head Charles Koerner. But here they were working from a pre-existing story and there was therefore less leeway to incorporate personal themes and concerns. Nonetheless, they did manage to mould the material into a form which exhibits many of the typical Lewton traits, and whilst it is not as resonant as either Cat People or I Walked With A Zombie, it does further explore some of the thematic elements which those films introduced.

The credits sequence immediately introduces us to the ambience with which the film is imbued; a view of the night street of a small town with the sound of castanets on the soundtrack evolving into a bolero theme. This is the sound of Hollywood exotic, and indeed the camera glides from the dark exterior through a shadowy corridor into a brightly lit dressing room where a dancer practices with her castanets for her nightclub act. This is Clo-Clo, the New Mexican dancer for whom the castanets are a constant accompaniment, always in her hands as if they were a natural extension of her body. They provide a soundtrack for her as she walks along the streets with a confident stride. It is as if she dances through life. Indeed her vitality and ability to incorporate romantic yearning alongside pragmatic realism within an all-inclusive and never cynical worldview make her the central embodiment of vitality and generosity within the film.

In this opening scene, however, we switch to the adjoining dressing room where two American voices disparage this sound, hammering on the wall to try to get her to shut up. One of them, putting on the costume of the cigarette girl, contemptuously says ‘oh, she’s a local’. There is a palpable sense of tension and rivalry in the room. The other woman is Miss ‘Kiki’ Walker, the ‘big star’ at the night club at which we are backstage. Eloise, the cigarette girl with dreams of stardom, makes it quite clear that she is ready and waiting to step into her shoes should she falter at any step. ‘I bet someday you’ll try on my coffin, and I hope it fits you perfect’, Kiki fires off. This rivalry, the sense that you need to be constantly looking over your shoulder, makes the night club a neat microcosm of America as a whole, a walled-off corral within which the values of ruthless individualism, competitive ambition and money predominate. It contrasts diametrically with the feeling of community which exists in the town outside.

The introduction of the leopard, led in by Jerry Manning, Kiki’s ‘good agent and good friend’, is a symbol of the savagery which lies beneath the civilised airs on display here. Indeed, it’s employment as a tool of showbiz rivalry, to upstage and displace Clo-Clo’s more popular ‘local’ act, puts this symbolism to immediate and explicit use. The leopard is an object which will inspire fear and awe, but most importantly attract attention. It is a way for these American outsiders to impose themselves on the local culture, using one of its totemic creatures. As we learn later from Galbraith, the museum curator, the jaguar and cats in general represented for the Indian indigenes ‘a personification of force and violence’. Kiki is clearly nervous about using this tool of aggressive force, but makes her choice. She chooses a black dress over a red one, ‘then I’ll be just like him’ (indicating the leopard), a creature serving its own needs and hungers, at the expense of others if need be.

In the courtyard of the night-club, the camera focuses on the fountain which is at its centre. This is the film’s symbolic object, the equivalent of I Walked With A Zombie’s statue of Saint Sebastian, and as with that meaning-drenched object, it will be used as visual punctuation, reminding us of its various significations. The small white ball balancing miraculously above the tumbling waters suggests the fragility of life and the mysterious forces which drive it. The ball could stand in for the human soul. Galbraith has his own interpretation, describing the fountaining waters which keep the ball dancing as being analogous to the forces which move us without our knowledge. This could be interpreted as referring to the subconscious or to supernatural or spiritual forces – a matter of belief and worldview. The interpretation of symbolism is ultimately a personal matter and may serve to reveal much about the reader. Certainly it gives a retrospective insight into Galbraith’s psyche (or soul, if you will) which at this point is untainted by murder but is evidently inclined towards the introspective.

The original script described Clo-Clo’s night club dance routine as being first seen reflected in the waters of the fountain’s basin, but a tight shooting schedule rendered this shot unfeasibly complex. It’s another indication of the water’s connotation of transience and fragility though. The water could stand in for the shadowy bars cast upon the walls in I Walked With A Zombie, here with its intimation of a reflective just beyond that of surface appearance, peripherally glimpsed through the intuitive lens of subconscious perception. Rather than the visual image, it is the signature sound of Clo-Clo’s castanets heard over the shot of the fountain which draws the parallel between her, the embodiment of life, and the transience of the tumbling waters and their tenuously suspended dancing ball. When she sees the leopard, led in by Kiki with Jerry ushering her on from behind a curtain, she immediately knows what is going on; she can see the calculation behind the act. Her startling of the leopard with her castanets is a confrontation of opposing forces; The castanets, which provide the rhythm for the dance of her life, daring the dark power of destructive chaos to take her on. It proves unequal to the challenge, and the leopard pulls free from Kiki’s grasp and runs into the night. It is significant that it is Jerry who has bought the leopard into play, urging a reluctant Kiki to carry out his plan. If he is indirectly responsible for the first death and Galbraith is culpable for those which follow, then the leopard stands for the loosing of a malevolent male wave of violence upon the female world. Kiki and Jerry have unleashed forces over which they never had real control. A waiter bears the three-furrowed scar of the leopard’s slashing claw, one of the workaday people who have to face the consequences of such casually used power.

The following police search introduces us to Charlie How-Come, ‘The Leopard Man’ from whom Jerry has hired the beast. He is a Native American (an Indian here) and thus adds a third layer of ethnic history to the New Mexican landscape: Indian followed by Spanish followed by American. This layering of histories is an important subtext of the film. The museum is a central thematic locale and is where the climax of the film takes place. The procession which ends the film is also an annual act of expiation, a commemoration of the savage incursions of the Spanish Conquistadores. The massacre of the powerless by those with exponentially superior force is reflected by the events which unfold over the course of the film, set in course and, as we shall see, perpetuated on this occasion by American men.
The scene in which the humane police chief Robles, Charlie and Jerry discuss the leopard hunt is interrupted by the arrival of Clo-Clo, once again heralded by the sound of her castanets, this time with a note of mocking triumphalism as she waves them in Jerry’s face.

We then follow Clo-Clo as she walks along the town street. She is used as a bridging character in several scenes, emphasising the close connections existing within the community. Here she confidently treads the well known pavement, greeting everyone she passes with a personal exchange betokening a knowledge of and interest in their lives. Clo-Clo is something of a dual character, however. A vivid personification of the spirit of life, she also carries with her something of the night; a faint aura of death. The sound of the castanets could be the dry sound of rattling bones, as musically represented by the xylophone in Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, his portrayal of the dance of death. When she drops in to see the gypsy fortune teller, she has the first of several card readings which draw a concluding ace of spades, ‘the death card’. This, as the gypsy tells her, can mean different things. It does not initially foretell her own death, but she is the connecting figure who seems to identify those who are about to meet their ends, as if she is passing that card on. She is there at the window greeting Theresa Delgado just before she closes it and is told by her mother to go out for cornmeal. She is given a flower by the maid who has just bought them for Consuela Contreras, who will go out to put them on her father’s grave. Finally, the card is not passed on and accurately foretells her own fate.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Best British Film Ever Made - Part Seven

7. Voices and Accents

I would love to have an accent like Roger Livesey. It has the soft, slightly rasped but perfectly balanced quality of a fine malt whisky. Possessed of a gentle, unassuming authoritativeness, it is like a beautifully played musical instrument. There is another Powell and Pressburger film, ‘I Know Where I’m Going’, in which he translates a Highland song for Wendy Hiller, who is trying to stick to the righteous path of marrying into money. Suddenly, Livesey turns to face her directly as he comes to the line ‘you’re the one for me’. She is doomed from that moment on. When Dr Reeves arrives in heaven (chatting with fellow-spirit John Bunyan) and is told that Peter has chosen him as his defending counsel, he gives a quietly satisfied, humourous smile and says ‘I hoped he might’. The understated quality of his response (no whooping and punching the air here) is full of the warmest affection.

There is much play with accents in A Matter of Life and Death. They are seen as embodying national characteristics but never fall into condescending stereotyping. They are too characterful for that. After all, they were created by a writer (Pressburger) who, as a European Jew between the wars, had been buffeted from country to country by the winds of history and who therefore had friends of many different backgrounds. He unfailingly found the best in these varied nationalities to the extent that even during the war, when propagandistic purposes might dictate otherwise, he was able to create sympathetic German characters. But he was never above a little gentle mockery as well. As we see newcomers reaching the top of the elevator into the celestial reception hall, there is an animated exchange in which a French airman wildly gesticulates as he re-enacts the final moments before his demise. The Englishman who is patiently listening to him and clearly understands not a word, nods as his tale concludes and says ‘bad luck old boy’. Two national stereotypes are painted with broad brushstrokes but there is a rather touching conclusion that such superficial differences of language and behaviour can be overcome by common experience and understanding.

There is much amusement to be had in the misunderstandings between Conductor 71 and, in heaven, Trubshaw and on Earth, Peter, but again they find that they all get along just fine in the end. After an initial misunderstanding over what ‘ ‘ad a few’ might mean, The Conductor and Trubshaw look like they are both ready to head for the bar as they bond over beer (‘ah, la biere’). And Peter and the Conductor eventually end up firmly on the same side as the Conductor’s romantic affinities lead him to give a little help at the trial.

The importance of voices is emphasised from the beginning. They are the first indications of human life that we encounter as we drift downwards to Earth and hear words emerging from both the English peasouper and the obscuring electronic fog of the radiophonic aether. Peter and June fall in love with each other’s voices. June says to Dr Reeves that ‘it’s his voice. I fell for that before I saw him’, whilst Peter tells the court that ‘we fell in love before we met’. People’s voices manage to convey much of their character, although they can also be used deceptively or strategically.

For English people, Churchill’s voice had come to represent the spirit of their country at a particular time, just as Hitler’s voice had seduced so many in Germany and beyond. This propagandistic use of the voice can be heard in the trial scene, in which Abraham Farlan indulges in some high nationalist rhetoric which serves to stir up certain sections of the crowd (although Trubshaw looks distinctly peeved). This is enhanced by the fact that he is striking noble poses looking outward from a striking rocky promontory. Another seductive voice using intoxicating language against a monumental backdrop to rally troops to a terrible and destructive cause. Facing each other across a literal gulf, Farlan and Dr Reeves are divided by time and by inclination. Farlan, in his American revolutionary uniform, is a soldier with a conscience rooted in war and a strident, hectoring and jingoistic voice to match. Dr Reeves stands in his tweed jacket, cardie and woollen tie and speaks with a reasoning, conciliatory voice, appealing to compassion and hope. His is the civilian voice of peacetime, of the future rather than the past (recent or otherwise).

Fancy a Brew?

I recently watched two films made in the same year (1989) which told the story of the same historical Japanese figure (and many thanks to Helene for lending these to me). Sen no Rikyu was a tea master in the late 16th century and was a key figure in the development of this highly aestheticised ritual. He enjoyed the patronage of the shogun Hideyoshi, but became embroiled in the politics of the court and was obliged (or ordered) to commit seppuku. The two films, Rikyu and Sen-no Rikyu, can be seen to fit in with the widespread ascendance of the ‘heritage’ film in the 80s, a return to historical subjects with much attention to period detail. The retreat from the modernist experimentation and generic exploration prevalent in the 60s and 70s is particularly marked in Rikyu, given that it’s director is Hiroshi Teshigahara, who produced some of the most remarkable examples of this type of cinema; films such as Woman of the Dunes, Pitfall and Face of Another. He had taken over his father’s position as head of an ikebana, or flower arranging, school in 1980 and had thus reconnected with the traditional arts of his country. Many of these are showcased in Rikyu.

Sen-no Rikyu is another version of the story from the same year (the films were made to mark Rikyu’s quatecentenary). This features a late performance from Toshiro Mifune, star of many of Akira Kurosawa’s finest films, in the title role. The copy which I saw was dubbed into Italian, which made it a surreal and strangely enjoyable experience, perhaps enhanced by the fact that I don’t speak a word of the language and didn’t have the benefit of subtitles. With a knowledge of the general outline of the story gleaned from seeing Teshigahara’s Rikyu first (both are based on a novel by Yaeko Nagami and so share basic plot details) I was able to let the visuals carry the narrative. Seeing the still bodies of Japanese men in traditional costume soberly enacting measured ceremonies whilst speaking in Italian, a language normally associated with effusive gesticulation, was odd to say the least. Mifune, in his younger years a very physical actor, is here seen in repose, playing the ‘maestro di the’ with a stiff formality. His Rikyu has a much more severe bearing than the more humane and approachable figure portrayed by Rentaro Mikuni in Teshigahara’s film. He seems to be loftily disapproving of what goes on around him and more directly at odds with Lord Hideyoshi, who is here depicted as straightforwardly brutish. This is a very male-centred film, too, in contrast with Teshigahara’s version. Women play a very subsidiary role, generally as motivation for male action.

Sen-no Rikyu has a Citizen-Kane-like structure, with a young pupil of Rikyu trying to find out what led to his master’s seppuku (ritual suicide) by visiting various people involved in his life. There are many picturesque exterior scenes which note the passing of the seasons and various historical sites in Kyoto are used as backdrops. Battle scenes here are staged (as opposed to ‘Rikyu’, where they are merely reported) in a style reminiscent of Kurosawa’s films of this period such as Ran and Kagemusha, although much less expansively. It is notable that Mifune’s Rikyu is present at these battles to provide the necessary rituals to the soldiery, and shows little unease about this duty. This is a rather martial tea master. Scenes of seppuku are also more graphically presented (although they are not dwelt upon) and the film as a whole is a lot more corporeal than Teshigahara’s.

Teshigahara’s Rikyu is much more a film of interiors and of the domestic detail which fills them. Rentaro Mikuni plays the titular character as a gentle man, wholly absorbed in his aesthetically ordered existence, in which the tea ceremony represents a balanced and contemplative approach to life as a whole. He becomes embroiled in politics and the intrigues of court entirely against his will and despite his best efforts to remain apart. Any efforts to influence Lord Hideyoshi are made indirectly through the example of his art, which encourages its participants to cultivate values of restraint and simplicity. Hideyoshi and Rikyu here have a rather touching odd couple relationship. The scene in which a petrified Hideyoshi applies Rikyu’s lessons to serve tea to the Emperor demonstrates their closeness. When the ceremony has been successfully concluded, Hideyoshi comes out to relate his triumph to Rikyu and almost does a little dance of glee, such is his relief. Here they are simply pupil and teacher. He is like an excitable child, in this scene and others. As such, he elicits our sympathy, whilst remaining unpredictable and easily influenced by flattery and the manipulation of his everpresent insecurity. Hideyoshi tries his best to absorb the lessons of Rikyu’s ceremonies, but his worldview remains fundamentally opposed. This is evident from the moment he enters the tea house in his gold slippers. He has come from a peasant background which he feels the need to disguise, chiding his unimpressed mother for failing to observe the necessary airs and graces. He marks his victory over a recalcitrant warlord by building a golden tea room in his palace, demonstrating his failure to grasp the most basic tenets of the way of tea. It is a gesture which Rikyu accepts, but with a look of disappointment at the evident lack of understanding of his teachings. Hideyoshi is presumably someone who has experienced genuine poverty and is as a result too dazzled by the gaudy appurtenances of wealth to be able to accept a philosophy based on ascetic simplicity.

Rikyu is always accommodating to his lord, never offering a contradictory opinion and hoping that his example will bear fruit in a wise and considered leadership. Rentaro Mikuni’s performance is one of warm reticence, his expressions subtly evoking the hopes that the approach to life embodied in the way of tea will have some effect and the resigned disappointment when it becomes apparent that this will not be the case. His scenes with his wife Riki have a relaxed domesticity which portray him as a very human character, far from the forbidding figure of reverence represented by Toshiro Mifune in Sen-no Rikyu. Indeed, the active role played by women in Teshigahara’s film counters their almost complete absence in Sen-no Rikyu, which is much more focused on male power play. Rikyu assigns his wife, Riki, to teach Hideyoshi’s wife the way of tea, and this liberal breach of tradition is seen by courtiers absorbed in their own power plays as a potentially threatening act. Rikyu is just carrying out his philosophy in aiming to make the way of tea universal; if it represents a unified vision of life, then it must be open to all. But to some, this is clearly a philosophy with undesirable political ramifications.

The film thus addresses the way in which art, even when it attempts to distance itself from politics, becomes engaged by default. Given that it takes up some kind of aesthetic stance towards the world, suggesting a particular worldview, art becomes open to use and abuse by the powerful (or those who seek power) who would use it to underline (or stand in opposition to) an ideological position. The favour which Rikyu initially finds with Hideyoshi and the influence of his art and philosophy exerts is eventually used against him. In refusing to impose his views on others, he leaves himself open to the imputing of ignoble motives behind the attainment of his unsought-for authority. The tributes of Hideyoshi’s golden tea room and a statue at a local temple which he has accepted as honestly-intended gestures whilst clearly wincing at their ostentation are made to seem like the self-glorifying creation of symbolic edifices of power. When Hideyoshi’s brother Hidenaga, a trusted counsellor and unswerving advocate of Rikyu dies, the tea master becomes prey to the self-aggrandising plots of the courtiers who now manipulate the self-deluded ruler. The increasing imbalance of the world of the court as opposed to that of the tea house causes a rift between the former teacher and pupil and eventually leads to the order for Rikyu’s ritual suicide.

The lovingly recreated backgrounds over which Teshigahara lingers provide a compendium of the cultural details of the time. In addition to the rituals of the tea ceremony, we observe the casting of the ‘wabi’ ceramics used for tea, with their emphasis on rough, natural forms; a Noh drama representing Hideyoshi’s triumphs; and the art of Ikebana, or flower arranging, about which Teshigahara evidently knew so much. Other incidentals include the startling fashion for the cosmetic blackening of teeth.

Of the two films, I definitely preferred Teshigahara’s Rikyu, perhaps aided by its non-Italianate dialogue and helpful subtitling. It has to be said that the American dvd release treats the film in contemptible fashion, shrinking it to a panned and scanned travesty of the director’s original framing and passing us off with a notably faded and low quality print. There’s really no excuse for such shoddy treatment these days, other than inherent cheapness and lack of regard for both artist and viewer. Poor bloody show.

We leave Rikyu in both films wandering off into the beyond. Mifune passes into the world of the clouds, the cries of his disciple dwindling into the distance, whilst Mikuni walks purposefully through a bamboo grove, it’s boles seemingly floating in mid-air. Just passing through.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Best British Film Ever Made - Part Six

6. Undidactic Inclusiveness
A Matter of Life and Death started with a propaganda dictate that the film should seek to bridge the gulf between the British and Americans and alleviate tensions which had arisen from the presence of so many American G.I.s on British soil. In the end, of course, it did so much more and transcended any limitations of propagandistic purposes rooted in a particular historical moment. And yet that initial impetus remains in the delight which the film takes in representing so many different types of people, not only of different races, but of different historical times and cultures. The differences are treated with wry humour but always with uncondescending acceptance. Powell and Pressburger enjoy these national and historical quirks and quiddities, and are not above having a poke at their own too. England is denounced as a country of dismal weather and interminably dull sports, before we are reminded that it is also the country of Donne, Dryden, Pope, Shelley and Keats. It is a country that Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew who had led an involuntarily peripatetic life, settled in and wholeheartedly adopted as his own. His outsider’s eye gave him a good perspective on the oddities of the national character and like many immigrants who find a new home on foreign soil, he eventually took on many of these characteristics to become more English than the English themselves, whilst retaining his Hungarian soul.

The feeling of belonging which Pressburger found in England forms the core of the ideal society envisaged by Dr Reeves in the trial scene. He notes that the jury has been ‘selected from many races, creeds and nationalities’ but requests a change in order to counter the divisions and resentments emphasised by Abraham Farlan. The jury shifts from a representation of the wounds of empire to a projection of the hopes for a future which has learned from the lessons of history. Dr Reeves offers a vision of people who merely happen to be of Irish, Chinese, African, French or Russian descent, trumping Farlan’s naked nationalism by rooting that vision in contemporary America. The national and racial descent remains largely the same in his jury but in this modern civil society, their identity resides in the roles they play. The uniform of a Napoleonic soldier is exchanged for a chef’s hat and apron; a Russian’s fur robe give way to the cap and badge of a taxi driver; a Chinese peasant’s traditional dress transmutes into modern clothing with a book of art history tucked under the elbow, the intellectual armoury of the inquisitive student; the Indian’s turban becomes the hard-hatted helmet of the African American soldier (a slight transmutation of race required for the cross-Atlantic change of scene); and the Irishman’s trenchcoat is replaced by a policeman’s uniform. All can take part in building the new world on either side of the ocean.

The celestial courtroom itself exemplifies this welcoming of difference and multiplexity. The vertiginously ascending aisles of this otherworldly colosseum are filled with all manner of people, sitting in their groups the better for us to identify them, but leaning across to talk to each other. The groups represented span historical and also racial, sexual and religious divides (and incidentally acknowledge the role played by women, and Indian and African American soldiers during the war) and in this immense, overarching space there is clearly room for everybody. As Doctor Reeves, always an advocate of the individual against the system, triumphantly states after victory has been won: ‘the rights of the uncommon man must always be respected.’