text: Pressburger and Powell's greatest movie. David Niven plays the RAF bomber pilot who misses his own death but is granted a second chance at life when heaven notices that he is AWOL and dispatches an angel to investigate. The scene when the young soldiers, men and women, black and white, all killed in action, arrive in heaven to be processed for eternal life is unbearably poignant. Watch out too for Roger Livesey, a deeply under appreciated actor, and Kim Hunter as the love interest (later, of course, Zira in Planet of the Apes). Incidentally, Steven Spielberg cast the actress who played the chief angel (Kathleen Byron) as the elderly wife of the eponymous private in Saving Private Ryan half a century later, an act that speaks volumes for his cinematic literacy.