Sixty-five years after it was released, A Matter of Life and Death is still seen as a visual feast. Perhaps because of the brilliance of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, production designer Alfred Junge and cinematographer Jack Cardiff, the film's raison d'etre is usually mentioned as an afterthought: when production started in September 1945, the film was conceived as an attempt to ease growing British wariness towards the US.
The story upends conventions by having British bomber pilot Peter Carter (played by David Niven) wooing and winning over an American radio operator, June (Kim Hunter) - a subversion of the Anglo-American balance of power during and after the second world war. (The accepted norm today is along the lines of the latest Captain America movie, where the American heroic male is partnered with a British female love interest.)
Beyond this, however, A Matter of Life and Death must have given the British authorities quite a migraine. In the final scene - set in 'the other world' populated by the deceased - a deliberation over Carter's life is expanded into a debate about Britain.
While Carter's dead British physician defends his country, his opponent - an American revolutionary who died fighting the British during the American war of independence - chastises British imperialistic history. In front of an audience containing dead Punjabi recruits of the British colonial army, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey) says: 'Think of India, Dr Reeves, think of India!'
A year after A Matter of Life and Death was released, the Raj was no more, and Burma and Ceylon would soon follow suit, as would most of the African colonies in the next two decades. In a way, the film was as forward-looking in its political nous as in its aesthetics.