FILM CLUB - A Canterbury Tale

The Powell & Pressburger Season -1944

In the middle of their golden era Powell and Pressburger made A Canterbury Tale. Their first considerable flop at the time of release, it appeared to misfire with the needs of its time. It wasn't until the 1970's when the entire corpus of their films was reevaluated, that it gained new fans, and its value was reclaimed. It is, however, still a distinct oddity in Powell and Pressburger's work, and that eccentricity was partly what their contemporary audience found difficult to contend with. Its mystic opacity remaining with it to this day.

It opens with a voice over, reading from Chaucer, as you see a visual representation of the pilgrimage in Chaucer's Canterbury Tale. And this is transformed into 1940's England by a fabulous piece of visual metamorphosis, where a mediaeval swooping hawk turns into a wartime spitfire descending from the sky and sweeping its way across the landscape. Three people , an American soldier (John Sweet ), a land girl (Sylvia Sim) and an English officer ( Dennis Price ) are all on their way towards Canterbury, but are a waylaid in idyllic Chillingbourne overnight. Whilst following the darkened path into town the land girl is attacked by an unidentified person in uniform, referred to by the locals as 'the glueman'. The remainder of the film is pegged on their search to discover who 'the glueman' actually is.

The film is much more than an empty headed who dunnit. It attempts to evoke what the spiritual heart of England is. Who 'the glueman' turns out to be, well its Thomas Colpeper ( Eric Portman ) the evidence certainly points towards him. Colpeper is a dark character, not particularly likeable, patronising and self assured. A local aristocrat, who has made himself into a guardian of the areas spirit, the relayer of its history and myths. Giving inspirational lectures in darkened public venues, to often poor attendance. But the subject he talks about in this slide show is a soliloquy tinged with romantic sentiment, for both a lost vision and the thwarted destiny or purpose of a nation. There are things he believes that are 'the glue' that holds us all together, not just in times of war. Those unspoken values, more felt than rational, represent its collective soul, the best there is of England.  Reconnected with these, the servicemen know, in their hearts at least, what they are fighting for. We first see Colpeper emerging from out of a field of wheat. There is something of the Magus or trickster about him. He is niether of this world or that pleasant.

Filmed by the cinematographer Erwin Hillier it was shot in black and white in one gloriously hot sultry summer in 1943. Hillier apparently was so in love with clouds, he wouldn't film if there was a beautifully clear blue sky. The air of an idyll, soft in focus and mist covered landscapes is due to the quality of his camera work. The romanticised gloss that permeates the film, visually and textually, can make it slightly harder to wholeheartedly digest.  Particularly for modern day more cynical, if not satirically minded audiences, who read such visionary idealism as naive and misguided. In this A Canterbury Tale is very much of its particular time and context. 

If you can get past that discomfort, there is in this film a simple, heartfelt, and at times almost rhapsodic message. Characters often stopping in mid sentence to stare in rapture at the sky, speaking evocatively about what they are seeing or feeling. And what they are touched by, is a mystical sense of the past being alive in the present. The land girl confesses to Colpeper that she could actually hear for one brief moment, the pilgrims voices as they traversed the ridgeway on their journey to Canterbury.

All our three characters have interrupted journeys, in life, love or career, each broken in some way by the war.  They do eventually see Canterbury, and once there, there is some reopening of their horizons, a renewal of faith, a glimpse of a better future, once the war has been won. 

Colpeper disappears at the end, vanishing as though his job has been done, returning to the earth from which he came. One can see why audiences might find, today as then, its themes and style a bit hard to fathom, let alone swallow. But this might be a film that could reveal greater depths on repeated viewing, more than even I might expect. Nothing here is quite as its first seems.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8