SHADOWS Contactless: Friday June 26, SBS on Demand + Messenger 9.00 pm: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

 The wartime team of Powell and Pressburger made British films like no one else. They might have had a touch of the nice or the jolly here and there in step with their times but there was always something extra, new, and daring about them. The Red Shoes takes us through the internal politics of a dance company but also into some surprisingly gothic moments. Powell's solo career included the disturbing Peeping Tom which effectively exiled him to Australia to make lighter fare. But at the peak of the duo's works is this curio, a what-if fantasy that takes in the worth of a single life against a backdrop of the big dark world war just over.

David Niven begins his journey as an intrepid RAF flyboy but in the strange event at the beginning of the story must find courage beyond the show of it and bargain for his own worth against everything he has known. Is he in the afterlife, a kind of purgatory where he might burn his bad side off, or is he only just plunging into delirium as his Lancaster Bomber plummets into the sea? Under the Powell and Pressburger helm this fantasy steers clear of the saccharine possibilities by keeping a weather eye on the darkness only a small reach away. The electric Kim Hunter shows she was more than the few B-movie roles she'd started with.

Join me for this unjustly obscure wonder and marvel at its sumptuous imagination. It's in black and white and colour so I had to pick something from each.