So this is a movie from 1946. And that’s important, because this is one of those movies telling a familiar type of story but in a weird-ass way.

The story is this: An RAF pilot’s plane is going down, and as it does, he’s chatting with an American radio “girl.” (Think Cap and Peggy Carter with the nationalities reversed.) And so he should have died in the crash, but he somehow didn’t; and he meets up with the woman from the radio, they fall in instant love, and BUT WAIT! He actually was supposed to have died, but the people running the afterlife lost him in the fog(!) and a representative from the afterlife is coming for him, to remedy their error and shuffle him along to the next world. So the pilot needs to make the case for why he should stay on Earth, which turns out to be “because he’s in love,” and there’s a big afterlife trial, and in the end love conquers all and he stays alive.

Okay, so far so good. But here’s what makes it weird:

  1. The movie actually starts off with a kind of cosmic view, narrated directly to the viewer in an almost nature-documentary fashion (“Big, isn’t it?”). It’s not quite comedy, but it’s not totally not comedic either.

  2. The afterlife is portrayed as this bureaucratically regimented place with register books that need to balance, and lots of policies and procedures and files and everything. It’s like the grimmest heaven ever. They actually sort of emphasize this with the Technicolor job: Earth is in full color, but the afterlife is B&W, like a reverse Wizard of Oz.

  3. The movie tries to do that “is it real or is he insane?” thing by having a doctor diagnose him with hallucinations caused by a concussion, with plausible medical symptoms; and the finale with the trial corresponds to a surgery to cure his condition. So it’s ambiguous… except for how it’s totally 100% unambiguous. Because like, there are a whole bunch of scenes where we’ve witnessed things in the afterlife where the main character isn’t there (including the intro where a narrator is talking to us), so it doesn’t seem like it’s actually in doubt in any way. So it ends up being this weird attempt to sow doubt that just totally fails to sow anything at all.

  4. The climactic trial spends a LOT of time shitting on the British. The prosecution’s lawyer is an American killed by the British at Concord in 1775, and he smugly talks about how this pilot should not get to stay alive because the British are scum and national character is destiny, and he introduces the jury of: a Frenchman, a guy from India, something something Boer War, and an Irishman. For a trial that will ultimately be a sappy thing about whether these young people have True Love, “the British sure are dicks” is a weird detour to take.

  5. The American title for this movie is “Stairway to Heaven” but AS FAR AS I CAN TELL, Led Zeppelin titled their song that without it being a reference to this decades-old movie at all. How can you have a famous movie and a famous song with the same title, and there’s no connection between them?

Anyway, I sort of vaguely understand why this is on the list — the dialogue is clever, and there’s a sort of playful lightness to the movie, and a certain visual imagination to the portrayal of the afterworld. But it still feels overrated, even down here at the bottom of the list.

Also, a fun thing: This movie was, as of a week ago, not available ANYWHERE, and I was going to have to rely on unofficial Youtube rips, which I always hate doing. But then this past week, Filmstruck had a “the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger” feature and BAM, there it is.