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Following The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Powell and Pressburger made two interesting full-length features in black and white, A Canterbury Tale (1944) and I Know Where I'm Going (1945), before embarking on what was to prove their most sensational film, A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Whereas its great predecessor had considerable emotional resonance, this new film offered a dazzlingly inventive display of cinematic technique, which did not, however, lack either wit or feeling.

One night in May 1945 an RAF pilot bails out of a blazing bomber over a foggy English channel and, despite having no parachute, survives. It seems there has been an administrative error in heaven and Conductor 71, an 18th century French aristocrat, is sent down to rectify it. But the pilot (who in reality is suffering from hallucinations) has fallen in love with an American girl, a ground controller with whom he was in radio contact just before bailing out. When faced by the Conductor he refuses to accompany him, claiming that his personal situation has changed because of heaven's mistake. A battle between earth and heaven for his body and soul ensues, culminating in an appeal court hearing in heaven to decide his fate. Love - and, as it turns out, Anglo-American co-operation - triumph.

The film was made at the instigation of the Ministry of Information, which was concerned to improve transatlantic relations now that victory had been won. What Powell and Pressburger came up with is one of the most remarkable and imaginative films in the history of the cinema, a bizarre and beautiful fantasy which cunningly serves its propaganda purposes through its simple love story and a reconciliation between Anglo-American prejudices. The extraordinary special effects, including a huge heavenly court attended by thousands of the dead of all periods, ages and persuasions, make some of the computer-generated counterparts of contemporary cinema look childish; and Powell and Pressburger enhance the film's exceptional visual quality by having the earthly scenes shot in colour and the heavenly ones in monochrome. David Niven, as debonair as ever, makes an appealing hero and Kim Hunter is quite adorable as the girl from Boston with whom he falls in love before he has ever seen her. Roger Livesey is excellent as the doctor who, with his knowledge of neurology, helps Niven and, after being killed in a road accident, defends him at his trial (there is no limit to the Archers outrageous inventiveness). But the acting honours go to Marius Goring as Conductor 71, a totally delightful performance. A controversial film on its initial release (when it became the first Royal Command Performance film) it has since achieved the considerable distinction of being in the top twenty of both the Time Out Film Guide's Centenary Top One Hundred Films and its Readers' Top One Hundred.

Powell and Pressburger's next film in the quartet was Black Narcissus (1947), rightly described by Leslie Halliwell as 'one of the cinema's most beautiful films, a visual and emotional stunner'. Based on a novel by Rumer Godden, the central characters are a small group of Anglican nuns led by Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) who are sent by their Order to open a school and dispensary high up in an isolated Himalayan kingdom. Despite their vocation the kingdom's ruler houses them in an old, windswept House of Women with its erotic murals, fluttering draperies and echoes of long-gone royal concubines. The sceptical and disrespectful English agent Dean (David Farrar) has turned native, hints at sexual relations with local girls and expects the group to fail by the time the rains come.

Sure enough, problems soon mount, exacerbated by the unhealthy environment, the local customs, Sister Clodagh's remembrance of an unhappy love affair back in Ireland and the waywardness of a dancing girl, Kanchi (Jean Simmons), who leads astray the nuns most distinguished pupil, the Young General (Sabu). (It is the latter's perfume, purchased from the Army and Navy Stores in London, which gives the story its title.) More dangerously, the neurotic Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) lusts after Dean and, driven by jealousy, attempts to murder Sister Clodagh in the film's wonderfully melodramatic, even operatic, climax. Contrary to general accounts the film was not wholly shot at Pinewood (some of the jungle scenes were filmed at Leonardslee Gardens near Horsham in Sussex) but it is nevertheless a visual wonder that is wholly convincing, not to say astonishing. (Jack Cardiff, the photographer and Alfred Junge, the German-born production designer, both won Oscars.) Above all, few British films can match its extraordinary atmosphere of repressed and hinted emotions - or , indeed, sexuality. (The moment when Sister Ruth, having discarded her nun's habit, applies make-up is charged with eroticism.) As the noted film historian Jeffrey Richards has acutely observed, 'the result is a heady brew of 19th century Romanticism, Oriental mysticism and religious and cultural conflict'. Kerr and Byron, in their different ways, are superb. Black Narcissus also bears the distinction of appearing in both of the Time Out Film Guide's polls.

And so to the final film of the four: The Red Shoes (1948). Aspiring ballet dancer Vicky Page (Moira Shearer, making her film debut) and aspiring composer conductor Julian Craster (Marius Goring) are new recruits to the Ballet Lermontov, run with a ruthless devotion to high art by impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook). Recognising their respective talents he commissions Craster to write the score for a new fantasy ballet, The Red Shoes, in which Vicky will dance the leading role.

It is a great success and a glittering future for both seems assured. Unfortunately for them professionally they fall in love, a heinous crime in Lermontov's eyes. Craster has a dispute with him and leaves the company, taking Vicky with him. They are married but what follows is essentially a battle between Craster and Lermontov for Vicky's soul. It ends, in the manner of the story by Hans Christian Andersen on which the screenplay is based, with Vicky's melodramatic suicide. (She jumps from the balcony of a theatre onto a railway track.) This essentially trite scenario is merely a narrative peg for a film aptly described by Leslie Halliwell as 'charged with excitement'. The background of the ballet company is made incomparably vivid by a team that not only include Powell and Pressburger but production designer Hein Heckroth (another German), photographer Jack Cardiff and composer Brian Easdale, whose superb score for The Red Shoes ballet - the film's astonishingly imaginative centrepiece - brought him an Oscar. Authenticity is assured with the presence in the cast of such ballet luminaries as Robert Helpmann, Leonid Massine and Ludmilla Tcherina. Any explicitly homosexual element is understandably absent (given the film's year of release) but the ambivalent feelings Lermontov develops for Vicky is subtly conveyed. Walbrook's is a consummate performance, one that binds together the story's disparate emotional tensions. In no other work in the cinema is such a spectrum of art forms fused in quite the way it is here. No wonder the production went 100% over budget. It was, incidentally, the most successful British film in America until Chariots of Fire 33 years later and appeared, like the other three films, in the Time Out Film Guide's Centenary Top One Hundred Films.

Powell and Pressburger went on to make eight more films together. Several are not without interest (particularly The Small Back Room (1949), in which David Farrar and Kathleen Byron were re-united, and the opera film The Tales of Hoffman (1951)) but they do not reach the achievements of their four predecessors. There was something about the period from 1943 to 1948 which invited innovation and it was never quite to return.

How can these films best be categorised in the context of the British cinema of their era? They are bold in concept, unconventional, enormously creative. And whereas even fine films like Great Expectations and The Third Man are, in the final analysis, 'safe' these are palpably 'unsafe'. They took risks and consequently attracted as much criticism as praise. Even today Powell and Pressburger no doubt continue to have their detractors. But these films stand apart, they work 'against the grain' and are truly 'charged with excitement'.

N.B Since the publication of Arrows of Desire there are now only 11 films missing, believed lost.