A Matter of Life and Death (film) afterward. David Niven was a fan of chess. Peter and June play chess while they await Dr Reeves. Then Conductor 71 "borrows" a chess book Peter has accidentally knocked off the table, Alekhine's "My Best Games of Chess". After the trial is won, Conductor 71 throws the book from the stairway; June finds it in his jacket pocket "to serve the 'was it a hallucination or did it really happen?' motif of the film", according to Mig Greengard. He also noted, "Lots of chess in movies past and present, but I can't recall another prominent appearance of a real chess
A Matter of Life and Death (film) Pressburger film render it indisputably the best of a batch of Christmas shows...[T]he wit and agility of the producers, who also wrote and directed the job, is given range through the picture in countless delightful ways: in the use, for instance, of Technicolor to photograph the earthly scenes and sepia in which to vision the hygienic regions of the Beyond (so that the heavenly 'messenger', descending, is prompted to remark, 'Ah, how one is starved for Technicolor up there!'." According to a 2006 book, "A spate of movies appeared just after the ending of the Second World War, including "It's