Your conception of the afterlife is put on the witness stand in this 1946 classic. We follow pilot Peter Carter as an oversight of cosmic bureaucracy leaves his soul in a tug of war between a sudden romance on earth and his eternal destination in heaven.
How did you imagine heaven as a child? Chances are it’s more true than the theological precision with which you now conceive it; that is, if you’ve managed to retain your belief at all.
How might you have imagined it in a foxhole? Perhaps as a sort of celestial lobby complete with coinless vending machines of bottled pop and attractive secretaries. Never been in a foxhole, you say? Well then I wouldn’t judge that rendering too harshly.
How do you imagine death when you’re pushing forty? (David Niven was 36 when this came out). As a surrealist plane crash, quoting Sir Walter Raleigh to a beautiful radio operator named June and lucidly leaving a telegram to your mother telling her at last you’ve always really loved her? Death is coming, but like…come on?
How do you imagine patriotism? As a Yank and a Brit in a final embrace exclaiming, “We’ve won!”? How do you imagine true love? As a clockstopping picnic in the forest that can swat off the angel of death and de Havilland mosquito alike with sheer stubbornness?
How might you imagine a second chance as Michael Powell or Emeric Pressburger? Is it with Kim Hunter cycling shoreside or Jack Cardiff’s apocryphal breath upon the lens? And—at last and inevitable—a kiss? With the color coding of an over-rainbowed Oz? With the wanna-live-again of George Bailey’s pneumatological cosmos?
“You’re life and I’m leaving you.” That’s all the screenplay is interested in. What do you make of your mortality and how will that change your life and the lives of others? A C.S. Lewisian patchwork of myth, history, literature, and pint after pint of old fashioned pub humor and wit.
How did you imagine God before you read all about him? As a bearded Roger Livesey with a camera obscura keeping watch? How else could you imagine him in this Christ shaped reality than the good doctor who drives in the rain after you to his own death only to lawyer up for you in the tribunal of tribunals, shouldering your appeal up a flight of impossible stairs? A stairway to heaven. — Mitchell Capps (2025)
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