Staiway To Heaven

The film Stairway to Heaven (1945) is a classic example of how production design can function to convey ideology. Commissioned by the government in an attempt to improve British-American relations, the film’s central conflict arises because of the love between a British soldier and an American WAC. The film uses lighting, color movements, and a variety of lines to idealize this relationship between its protagonists, and to thus establish a positive association in the viewer’s mind with British-American relations in general. Towards the beginning of the film, the audience is introduced to the two main characters in Stairway to Heaven, Peter and June, as he radios in to tell her his plane is going down. Although they are strangers, Peter spends his

When Peter, the main character, is in “real life,” the shots are beautifully technicolored. But whenever the scene shifts to “the Beyond,” as Peter calls it, the colors fade through sepia to soft blacks and whites. At first watch, it might be tempting to assume that these sequences of the Beyond are more fantastical in nature than those of Peter’s life. But if we consider other films that have used this transition between color schemes, like the Wizard of Oz (1939), it is notable that they usually start out with black and white in the real world and reserve color for the fantasy. Thus, by giving glorious technicolor to Peter’s “real world” and shooting the Beyond in monochrome, the film makes the suggestion that it is in fact Peter’s life that is the fantasy, because of his love for June, and that the cold, hard reality he must face is actually the reality of the trial in the Beyond. This idea subtly intoned by a rather blunt use of color helps to perpetrate the value and idealism of the love between Peter and June, by suggesting that for Peter, loving June is better than heaven ever could