A Matter of Life and Death review – timely rerelease of sublime celestial romance

AMatter of Life and Death is the utterly unique, enduringly rich and strange romantic fantasia from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. You could put it in a double bill with It’s a Wonderful Life or The Wizard of Oz, though its pure English differentness would shine through. It was released in 1946, the same year that Winston Churchill coined the term “special relationship” – an idea that the film finds itself debating. With that concept now under pressure, 2017 is a good time for this classic to be rereleased in UK cinemas.

The film begins with a sensational flourish: a nuclear explosion that destroys a solar system. We start by drifting through outer space, accompanied by a droll narrative voice, commenting on its vastness and noticing a sudden supernova way in the distance: “Someone must have been messing about with the uranium atom.” The eerie casualness of that revelation sets the otherworldly tone for the rest of what follows. The starlit expanse, the intertitles, the distant detonation, the huge quasi-senatorial valhalla, all hint at where George Lucas got ideas for the Star Wars movies.

Then we find ourselves on Earth in 1945, where RAF pilot Peter Carter, played by David Niven, is flying back to Britain after a bombing raid, losing height, badly hit. He has presumably been attacking German cities, and it has to be noticed that Germans are not represented here, either in this world, or the next. Carter’s parachute has been damaged; he knows he is going to die, and with impossibly dashing flair, he radios his final position to an astonished American radio operator called June, played by Kim Hunter, asks her to contact his family and flirts with her. June and Peter fall in love at that moment.

The miracle is that Peter seems to survive, staggering out of the sea. He finds June, and with the help of a local doctor, Frank Reeves, played by the incomparable Powell/Pressburger stalwart Roger Livesey, he is gradually nursed back to health. Yet an emissary from heaven, in the form of a dandified pre-revolutionary French aristocrat played by Marius Goring, informs Peter that his survival is a mere clerical error and he is expected back in the afterlife right away. Peter complains that now he has fallen in love he is entitled to remain below. A huge trial is in prospect, and a prosecuting counsel is chosen: American revolutionary veteran Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), who intends to argue that this decadent Brit has no business with a good American girl. Frank believes that these heavenly visions are delusions caused by his brain injury and everything – or almost everything – is consistent with that rational explanation. But how did Peter survive the fall?

A Matter of Life and Death is a visually extraordinary film: a gorgeous artificiality is created by Alfred Junge’s production design and Jack Cardiff’s vivid Technicolor photography. Counterintuitively, the heaven scenes are in black and white and Earth is in colour. The modernist architecture of heaven is something to rival Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the “stairway to heaven” sequence (which gave this film its US title) is narcotically weird. Even down on Earth, and without the angelic visits, things have a distinct surreality. Frank likes nothing more than to keep the village under benign surveillance with his camera obscura device, evidently kept on a high rotating turret, which gives him live pictures of everything that’s happening in the village. He is like the voice and eye of an all-seeing God. And perhaps the most extraordinary moment comes when Peter encounters a naked young goatherd on the beach: it is this figure – like someone from a late Shakespeare play, such as The Tempest – who tells Peter that he is back on Earth. (The boy’s nakedness meant that this sequence was cut for TV transmission by prim US networks; Martin Scorsese has spoken entertainingly of his periodic exasperation at sitting down to watch and finding it is the bowdlerised version.)

So what does this film have to say about the special relationship? The speechifying on the subject of history and politics might disconcert some viewers who would rather hear and see more about Peter and June’s romantic adventure. But Powell and Pressburger are telling America and the world that just as Squadron Leader Peter Carter does not want go to heaven, so Britain itself is not dead; it does not deserve to be consigned to history along with those effete and irrelevant periwigged Frenchmen. Britain lives – in partnership with America.

I have watched this film many times, but it was only on sitting down to it again that I finally realised what Frank Reeves’s death reminded me of. Riding his motorbike fast in the rain, Dr Reeves had selflessly swerved in order to save the lives of the ambulancemen and their patient, conveying Peter to hospital. His sacrifice means that he can go to heaven to be Peter’s defending counsel. How should we feel about this terrible event? I had a flashback to a long-suppressed memory of reading CS Lewis’s The Last Battle, the final Narnia episode, in which Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Diggory and Polly are revealed to be killed in a train crash, along with the Pevensie parents, and so they can be admitted to eternal life. It was a profoundly strange happy-sad collision. So is this.

Losing the X Factor: is it time for the X-Men universe to stop expanding?

When James Franco entered talks to play superhero Multiple Man in an upcoming movie, we can only imagine the actor, director, screenwriter, musician and poet saw the character as a metaphor for his own creative endeavours. For Marvel mutant James Madrox was named for a useful ability to duplicate himself countless times over, meaning he is capable of living scores of lives all at once.

Hence, one Multiple Man can spend decades learning Shaolin kung fu, while another can study for a law degree, all while the main Multiple Man goes about his daily superhero business. Eventually these “dupes” are (usually) reabsorbed back into the original Multiple Man, resulting in useful new skills for Madrox Prime, but occasionally they crop up years later to cause trouble for their clone daddy.

Likewise, it is rather tempting to imagine Franco frowning at the memory of the time one of his forgotten Franco dupes turned up unexpectedly in General Hospital, or appeared as the second Green Goblin in superhero dud Spider-Man 3. Can this really be the same accomplished indie actor who played Sean Penn’s on-off lover in the wonderful, Oscar-winning biopic Milk, or who directed himself as Tommy Wiseau in the acclaimed story of the so-called “worst film ever made”, The Disaster Artist? Perhaps there really is an army of Franco clones out there, allowing the actor to teach classes at a New York University while simultaneously running his own production company, hosting the Oscars and recording albums for his own English new wave–themed pop duo.

The very existence of a Multiple Man movie also reminds us that the X-Men universe itself is exploding into myriad new forms like a mogwai in a shower who’s just been fed several Big Macs long after midnight. Next year’s big mutant movies are a mixed bunch: X-Men: Dark Phoenix will revisit the famous comic book storyline in which Jean Grey loses her powers, while Josh Boone’s The New Mutants will further push the envelope by segueing into psychological horror. Elsewhere on the big screen, Bryan Singer’s mainstream saga has been all the way back to the 1960s, swapped its cast for younger models and subsequently zoomed forward in time to both the 1980s (X-Men: Apocalypse) and the late 2020s (this year’s Logan).

Deadpool, one assumes, operates in the present day, though it barely matters given the meta-tastic filter that has been applied, and the loose (to say the least) connection between Tim Miller’s movie – an untitled sequel is also due next year –and any of the other films. Likewise, FX’s Legion might be about a mutant who is the psychologically challenged son of Professor X in the comics, but you’d hardly know it.

The latest TV series to spin off from the X-Men is Fox’s The Gifted, which focuses on a mother and father (True Blood’s Stephen Moyer and Joss Whedon regular Amy Acker) who are forced to go on the run after their teenage children begin exhibiting dangerous mutant powers. Again, the show is supposedly part of the same universe as the X-Men movies, but is conveniently set in an alternate timeline where the costumed mutants have disappeared – so don’t expect Patrick Stewart or James McAvoy to turn up any time soon with sage words of follically challenged wisdom.

This time around, creator Matt Nix has chosen to hark back to the early X-Men movies, back before Brett Ratner was handed the keys to the kingdom on X-Men: The Last Stand and it was still possible to see mutant powers as an intelligent pop culture metaphor for queer identity, or simply being different. But the new show doesn’t stop there. Possession of the mutant gene is also not-so-subtly compared to the African American experience in times of slavery. The underground network of sympathisers that exists to get mutants over the border to Mexico recalls the historical Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape to free states and Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries. One has to wonder if Nix and his team would have been better off creating a single well-honed allegory to a historical example of institutionalised prejudice, rather than choosing to borrow from every example under the sun.

Moreover, I can’t be alone in wondering if all these myriad X-Men shows and movies will ever be reunited into one great X-Universe with a single tone and timeline, or if they ever could be. In the original Marvel comics, part of the fun (as in the Marvel shows and movies) is that you never know when household names such as Spider-Man or the Hulk might turn up at the X-Mansion to borrow some sugar. Likewise, the best Multiple Man stories were those in which Madrox came into contact with one of his long-lost “dupes”, and either gained a useful skill upgrade or found that he had inadvertently fathered several new sprogs.

As long as the X-Men universe keeps expanding in so many diverse ways, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see its many offspring reabsorbed back into the whole. And there is also a sense of ever-diminishing returns here. For when dozens of duplicates all operate under a single guise, as Multiple Man could have warned us, there is no guarantee they will all retain the qualities that made us warm to the original in the first place. Haven’t they seen Gremlins?

Weinstein Company under investigation by New York attorney general

The New York attorney general has opened a civil rights investigation into the Weinstein Company following dozens of sexual misconduct allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

The state’s top prosecutor has issued a subpoena for records related to sexual harassment and discrimination complaints at the embattled film company, weeks after the movie mogul was fired from the company he co-founded, in the wake of a slew of sexual assault and harassment accusations.

News of the civil rights inquiry and wide-ranging subpoena comes as the list of Weinstein’s accusers has continued to grow, prompting police departments across the globe to begin criminal investigations.

The office of the attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is investigating whether the Weinstein Company, headquartered in New York, violated local civil rights and human rights laws and has sought all documents tied to sexual harassment and gender discrimination cases, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The prosecutor’s civil rights bureau issued the subpoena, which is also seeking records concerning how complaints were handled and resulting settlements. The inquiry is further targeting records related to management’s criteria to hire and promote applicants and employees, the source said.

“No New Yorker should be forced to walk into a workplace ruled by sexual intimidation, harassment, or fear,” Schneiderman said in a statement Monday. “If sexual harassment or discrimination is pervasive at a company, we want to know.”

The source said the subpoena also sought records that would indicate whether the company had launched formal investigations in response to complaints and the reasoning behind those decisions.

Weinstein’s spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Weinstein Company – the production firm behind critically acclaimed hits such as The King’s Speech, Carol and The Butler – also did not respond to an inquiry.

The corporation is currently at risk of collapsing, according to entertainment industry lawyers, who have said the company is vulnerable to investor and victim lawsuits. The board, which includes Bob Weinstein, Harvey’s brother, has claimed that it had no knowledge of misconduct. The actor Rose McGowan, who has accused Weinstein of rape, has called for the entire Weinstein Company board to resign.

The scandal first erupted with a New York Times investigation alleging that Weinstein had reached settlements with at least eight women over accusations of sexual misconduct. The producer would invite women to his hotel room for a supposed business meeting and then would greet them in the nude, demand a massage or ask that they watch him shower, according to the women.

A later New Yorker story included accounts from multiple women who said Weinstein raped them. A wide range of actors, models and other women have since shared their own allegations of the producer’s misconduct, including Lupita Nyong’o, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Cara Delevingne, Léa Seydoux and Romola Garai.

Some have said that that strict non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) have prevented them from speaking out. Zelda Perkins, who says Weinstein sexually harassed her when she was his assistant, publicly broke her NDA in an interview published on Monday, saying: “I want to call into question the legitimacy of agreements where the inequality of power is so stark and relies on money rather than morality.”

Perkins said she was pressured into signing an agreement after she confronted Weinstein about an alleged sexual assault against her colleague at a film festival in Venice in 1998.

Weinstein has apologized for causing pain, but has said he denies many of the claims of harassment and “unequivocally” denies allegations of “non-consensual sex”.

The controversy has inspired women in Hollywood and other industries to publicly share stories of sexual assault in recent weeks. In an unprecedented move, Weinstein was recently expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Police investigations are under way in New York City, London and Los Angeles, and some legal experts say Weinstein could ultimately face serious sexual assault charges.

Brexit critic Colin Firth opts for Italian passport for ‘family reasons’

Many of the threats and promises exchanged during the row over Brexit have yet to be tested by time, but this weekend at least one has come to pass. The Oscar-winning film actor and producer Colin Firth, unmoved by Theresa May’s pronouncements in Florence, has accepted Italian citizenship, according to the Italian interior ministry in Rome.

It was reported in May that the actor had made a formal application for Italian citizenship in response to the vote to leave the European Union, while last year Firth’s apparent opposition to the referendum result was noted in an Austrian newspaper.

He was said to have described Brexit as “a disaster of unexpected proportions”. The actor’s agent said that the decision to apply for a new passport at the Italian embassy in London had been a family decision. He would not confirm that it had anything to do with Brexit.

“Colin applied for dual citizenship [British and Italian] in order to have the same passports as his wife and children,” the agent said.

The 56-year-old star came to fame as Jane Austen’s aloof Mr Darcy, the epitome of the reticent English aristocrat, in an acclaimed 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. But from now on Firth is officially as Italian as spaghetti carbonara.

“The very famous actor, who won an Oscar for the film The King’s Speech, is married to a citizen from our country and has often declared his love for our land,” the Italian interior ministry said.

Firth, who grew up and went to school in Hampshire, has been married to the Italian environmental campaigner, fashion entrepreneur and film producer Livia Giuggioli since 1997. The couple live in Chiswick, London, with their two sons Luca, 16, and Matteo, 13.

Since Italy is one of the few European countries that allows dual nationality, Firth is expected to keep his British passport as well as a home in this country.

Firth and Giuggioli, 47, also have a house near the town of Città della Pieve in Umbria and the actor speaks good Italian. His 2008 film Genova, directed by Michael Winterbottom, told of a widower who falls in love first with Italy and then with an Italian woman. The actor, who has also appeared in the hit films The English Patient, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love, Actually and Shakespeare in Love, is currently promoting his new film Kingsman: The Golden Circle, a sequel to the ironic, action-packed 2015 hit.

Since the Brexit decision, a growing number of Britons have applied for citizenship in EU countries, with Irish applications exceeding all others. Any Briton born in the Irish Republic or Northern Ireland, or with an Irish parent or grandparent, is entitled to an Irish passport and it is thought six million could be eligible.

May went out of her way in Florence to pledge that hundreds of thousands of Italians living in the UK would retain their full rights.

Yesterday, Colin Firth said in a statement: “A connection with Italy has existed in my family for more than two decades now. I was married there and had two children born in Rome. My wife and I are both extremely proud of our own countries. We feel that we’ve made a gift of that to each other.”

“Our children have been dual citizens since the beginning. We never really thought much about our different passports. But now, with some of the uncertainty around, we thought it sensible that we should all get the same. Livia is applying for a British passport.”

“I will always be extremely British (you only have to look at or listen to me). Britain is our home and we love it here. Despite the enticements of my profession to relocate to more remunerative climes I’ve always chosen to base my career out of the UK and pay my taxes here. That hasn’t changed.”

“I married into Italy (and anyone will tell you when you marry an Italian you don’t just marry one person; you marry a family and perhaps an entire country…). Like almost everybody I have a passionate love of Italy and joining my kids in being dual citizens will be a huge privilege.”

George and Amal Clooney donate $1m to combat US rightwing extremism

George and Amal Clooney have announced a partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center to combat “bigotry and hate” in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Clooney Foundation for Justice says that it will bestow a grant of $1m to the SPLC in order to assist the civil rights organization in its attempts to combat violent extremism in the US, following the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer at a white supremacist rally in the campus city earlier this month.

“Amal and I wanted to add our voice (and financial assistance) to the ongoing fight for equality,” George Clooney said. “There are no two sides to bigotry and hate.”

“We are proud to support the Southern Poverty Law Center in its efforts to prevent violent extremism in the United States,” the pair added in a statement. “What happened in Charlottesville, and what is happening in communities across our country, demands our collective engagement to stand up to hate.”

SPLC president Richard Cohen welcomed the Clooney Foundation’s contribution at a time when the radical right in America is “energized”.

“Like George and Amal Clooney, we were shocked by the size, ugliness, and ferocity of the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville,” he said in a statement. “It was a reflection of just how much Trump’s incendiary campaign and presidency have energized the radical right. We are deeply grateful to the Clooney Foundation for standing with us at this critical moment in our country’s fight against hate.”

The donation comes at a time when federal funding to organizations combating rightwing extremism in the US has been frozen by Donald Trump’s administration. Trump himself was roundly criticized for his response to the events in Charlottesville, with the president declaring that activists from “both sides” had been responsible for the violence.

The Clooney Foundation for Justice was established in 2016 to “advance justice in courtrooms, communities and classrooms around the world.” Earlier this month it announced plans to provide $3.25m to help 3,000 Syrian refugee children receive an education in Lebanon. “We don’t want to lose an entire generation because they had the bad luck of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time,” George Clooney said in a statement.