The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
80. 1946 - A Matter Of Life And Death
Honourable Mentions: It's a Wonderful Life, The Best Years of Our Lives, My Darling Clementine
1946 is in contention for being the greatest year in movie history, stacked as it is with classics from the likes of Frank Capra, William Wyler, and John Ford. It was a year of post-war introspection and weighty, emotional narratives, as Hollywood shifted through the rubble of six years of conflict and questioned what would come from such a violent and sudden metamorphosis.
All three of the above-mentioned honourable mentions from Capra, Wyler, and Ford bear the scars of the war, and are almost overwhelming in their vulnerability when the full context of their filmmaking journeys is made apparent. They're true masterpieces, but if one film were to exemplify that profound sense of post-war weight, it would have to be the ethereal and elemental A Matter of Life and Death.
Perhaps Powell and Pressburger's greatest film, A Matter of Life and Death brings to bear the cost of the conflict in a deeply spiritual way, as RAF pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) inexplicably emerges as the sole survivor after his bomber is shot down and falls in love with US Army Air Forces controller June (Kim Hunter). Only, cosmically, Carter was in fact meant to have perished in the encounter, but his angel - an 18th-century French aristocrat called "Conductor 71" (Marius Goring) - lost him in the fog over the English Channel.
What ensues is a battle between the technicolor of our world and the black and white afterlife, as Peter pleads his case for survival to the ghosts of history, which he does while experiencing seizures brought on by an untreated concussion. The staging of the afterlife, in this case, is a prism through which Powell and Pressburger explore the topic of survivor's guilt; Peter is desperate to live, but there's a part of him that thinks he should have died with his comrades over the channel. It's beautiful staging for a beautiful story, and while there will be those who point to 1948's The Red Shoes as The Archer's opus, A Matter of Life and Death is immortal cinema.