There are two clichés about the English that continue to endure despite copious attempts to prove them unfounded. One is that they are stubbornly unromantic, preferring always to muddle through life with caution and pragmatism rather than submit to overwhelming emotion. The other is that they can’t make good cinema.

To which there is one answer, a trump card so devastating that it ends all argument instantly: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. The 1946 film, which is often quoted in cineastes’ all-time top 10 lists, is still, relatively speaking, under-acknowledged by the wider public. Powell does not enjoy anything like the acclaim afforded to Alfred Hitchcock, whose talent was no greater. The screenplays of Pressburger (Hungarian by birth, trained in Germany, but as English as drizzle in sensibility) are rarely quoted in discussions of great writing.

Although better known for the torrid art-versus-life romanticism of The Red Shoes, or the barmy erotic charge of Black Narcissus, P and P saved their most poignant insights for A Matter of Life and Death. It begins with a stentorian voice-over that seems to come from the centre of the universe, as the camera pans stealthily around the galaxy. There is a sudden explosion. “Someone must have been messing about with the uranium atom,” chides the voice-over. “It was not our solar system, I’m glad to say.”

The sense of human vulnerability is established right in these opening seconds: the film had started shooting just a few weeks after Hiroshima and Pressburger could not resist adding the mischievous aside to the script. The film unravels from there as the tenderest of love stories: David Niven’s pilot is rescued from death when an envoy from Up There is late in intercepting his fall from a blazing bomber. In the meantime, Niven falls in love with a radio operator, played by Kim Hunter. Will he be allowed to stay on earth to fulfil his tentative romance? Can love cheat death?

That, needless to say, was a resonant theme for the time. How do we react to it today? The National Theatre is audaciously attempting the unenviable task of transferring the film’s extraordinary, dream-like quality to the stage. The director, Emma Rice, promises a contemporary updating. The film opens with the explanation that its other-worldly sequences “exist only in the mind of a young airman whose life and imagination have been violently shaped by war”. We are still, Rice observes plainly over a coffee during rehearsal break, a country at war.

It goes without saying that she adores the film, lauding it as a work “so before its time that we are almost not there now”. The opening scene, she says, when Niven talks from his ailing aircraft to the radio operator who can do nothing to save him, is a work of structural genius. “It is a phenomenal piece of writing. They almost go through an entire relationship in a couple of minutes: they meet, they court, they have some ordinary moments, and they prepare for death.” Pressburger’s high-culture leanings are never more evident than here, as Niven quotes the poetry of Marvell and Walter Raleigh during the “courtship” phase, the refinement of which dates the work every bit as much as its second world war setting.

But Rice does make one important change to what she sees as a flawed masterpiece. In the original film, the pilot is English and the radio operator American. It is an important point. The film was partly financed by the British and American governments to help aid mutual understanding. The trial in “heaven” (the word is never used) at the film’s climax, to determine whether the couple really could be in love, ends in a triumphant embrace that was meant to have a profound cultural, as well as emotional, significance.

Rice thinks the scene “falls to pieces” and is ridding the female lead of her American nationality. “The issue of whether an American could love an English person is a ludicrous question in 2007, which means I can’t make a piece of theatre about it,” she says boldly. “I think we may be close to what Pressburger intended. We got hold of his shooting script and the trial scene had scribbles all over it. He wrestled with it.”

One sees the point. But I am secretly a little sorry. The trial scene in the film is a fascinating statement of the prejudices that the two victorious Allied powers held towards each other. It starts when the American prosecutor lays into the English record of provoking war and attacks the mother country’s fatal sense of complacency. “This is the voice of England in 1945,” he charges before the world audience and switches on the radio, which is tuned into a particularly somnolent cricket match.

“And this,” counters the English defence, “is the voice of America!”, and we hear some swing music, clearly meant to to denote some lapse in civilised cultural standards that causes much embarrassment. The snore of cricket versus the sassiness of swing: this was the dialectic that dominated British and US mutual perceptions. That the two countries had combined so successfully in the solemn arena of war undoubtedly lightened the debate but the tension is palpably there.

Sure enough, after some earnest joshing about which country has the better record for respecting the rights of the individual, we have Powell and Pressburger’s conciliatory pay-off: “Love, and truce, and friendship,” says Roger Livesey’s benign advocate, “these are the qualities alone that can build a new world today and must build a better one tomorrow.” The romance of A Matter of Life and Death is thus sublimated into the creation of a new, and happier, world order.

Rice says that, rather than lapse into nostalgia, her production will equally address contemporary concerns. The trial, she says, will be much more closely focused on the pilot’s state of mind, and “survivor guilt, if that doesn’t sound too Oprah Winfrey”. But she will retain the happy ending, I semi-plead? An ominous pause. “No comment.”

‘A Matter of Life and Death’ is part of the National Theatre’s Travelex £10 season, www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

peter.aspden@ft.com

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