I first ran across this movie on either TBS or TNT as "Stairway to Heaven." This movie also has a touch of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" in it, where the fate of the main character is in the hands of a celestial jury, some of which date to The Revolutionary Was and have objections to the David Niven character's romance.

This movie is from just two years after Between Two Worlds (a remake of 1930's Outward Bound), that has a related sort of theme.

In it's native UK it's considered one of the greatest English films and the team of Powel and Pressburger one Britain's greatest contribution to filmmaking. Other 1940s adult fantasy films are A Guy named Joe with Spenser Tracy, remade in 89 as Always, The Enchanted Cottage, the French Beauty and the Beast, Portrait of Jennie, _Heaven can Wait, Here Comes Mr Jordan, Angel on my Shoulder , Beyond Tomorrow , The Ghost and Mrs Muir, etc

There were other films with supernatural element as well in comedy, suspense etc

Thanks chaps 👍 I looked a few of these titles up and there are some great suggestions in there judging from the descriptions.

Will definitely get a couple of these for some sentimental viewing over the holiday period.

I do find it intriguing that they made so many of these type of films back then. Would be interesting to see how modern cinema audiences would take to this sort of narrative.

Love this movie. This is the picture of Kim Hunter and David Niven I always think of whenever I hear it mentioned.

Another mid-'40s movie that has a dead (but still around) key character at its core is the 1944 fantasy The Curse of the Cat People (a sweet film, despite the title), about a little girl who makes her father's late first wife her enchanting best friend.

Incidentally, that film has a significant Christmas component, therefore "works" well for holiday season viewing.

The Bishop's Wife from 1947 had both a Christmas and a supernatural element. David Niven and Cary Grant stsr

Another good lesser known Christmas based movie is Remember the Night with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray

I love Remember the Night (which no one is dead in, incidentally). It and The Bishop's Wife are amongst the classic holiday films that I very much enjoy and have the DVDs of.

This film is superb. Alas I dont like 'Its a Wonderful Life' (I didnt find it a compelling interpretation of hardship and struggle) and can't think of anything else in the ilk of 'A Matter of Life and Death'. One that might fit the bill, without the supernatural or spiritual angle, is On the Beach (1956) with Gregory Peck, which I am dying to see and contemplated nuclear war.

True no one is dead in Remember the Night but Stanwyck and MacMurray would team up later in Double Indemnity that has a corpse or two. A great film pair. And on the subject of a film with a is she or isnt she dead character is 1944s Laura

By the way gen what is the way to directly link a title to it's tmdb page

@genplant29 said:

Another mid-'40s movie that has a dead (but still around) key character at its core is the 1944 fantasy The Curse of the Cat People (a sweet film, despite the title), about a little girl who makes her father's late first wife her enchanting best friend.

Incidentally, that film has a significant Christmas component, therefore "works" well for holiday season viewing.

znex, if you type in a movie's, or whatever else's, title/name/etc. into a comment you're writing, put that title or whatever within brackets [ ], then, via a different screen, look up the Overview page (or whatever) you want to share a link to, copy its entire url (which appears across the upper portion of the screen), paste that into the message you're typing, then place that url within parentheses ( ) right after the title (or whatever) that you've placed within brackets. That'll convert the bracketed word or words into a link, once you save your message. By the way, make sure there's a single blank space between the bracketed title (or whatever) and the parenthesized url.

@genplant29 said:

znex, if you type in a movie's, or whatever else's, title/name/etc. into a comment you're writing, put that title or whatever within brackets [ ], then, via a different screen, look up the Overview page (or whatever) you want to share a link to, copy its entire url (which appears across the upper portion of the screen), paste that into the message you're typing, then place that url within parentheses ( ) right after the title (or whatever) that you've placed within brackets. That'll convert the bracketed word or words into a link, once you save your message. By the way, make sure there's a single blank space between the bracketed title (or whatever) and the parenthesized url.

Interesting. I always leave out the blank space.

I just now tried without a space, and see a space automatically becomes inserted upon clicking on Save. That's good to know - and I wouldn't have ever realized that had you not made the comment, above, wonder.

Blank (white) spaces in links, etc. can be tricky. They're usually ignored by browsers, but when using a tool like Preview they're not.