A CANTERBURY TALE (1944) • Frame Rated

An ancient window looks out onto a neighbouring medieval house; framed in the window is a British soldier wearing the uniform of the mid-20th century. A dusty caravan sits in a nondescript modern garage; through the garage window can be glimpsed the vast stone mass of Canterbury Cathedral. The past and the present are indissolubly linked in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, and there is a spiritual context to even the most mundane things.

These and other striking images allow the film to achieve a kind of transcendence and bring some unity to it, despite Powell and Pressburger’s tendency to include scenes and characters purely for their own sake, even when they contribute little to the overall narrative impetus. (In practice, Pressburger wrote the pair’s films and Powell directed, though they took joint credit for both endeavours.) But still, A Canterbury Tale remains one of the stranger masterpieces from a filmmaking duo whose work was never run-of-the-mill or predictable.

Added here to their typical rather disconcerting mix of the realistic and the lyrical, the profound and the whimsical is a hint of the supernatural—maybe even a touch of something approaching folk horror too. Despite the prominence of the cathedral in A Canterbury Tale, it’s difficult to escape the impression of something pagan running deeper in the film’s hymning of the English countryside. It is not a very long distance from Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), the pillar of the community who is all-but-revealed quite early on as the perpetrator of weird nocturnal mind games in A Canterbury Tale, to Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle manipulating the people of his fiefdom in The Wicker Man (1973).

The story has no direct connection with Chaucer, although the pleasant, chatty innkeeper who discusses the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury (or what the film sometimes calls the Pilgrims’ Road) with one of the main characters may be a reference to Harry Bailly, The Host in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. More broadly, Powell and Pressburger’s movie does resemble The Canterbury Tales in the way it brings together a disparate group of people of different backgrounds, all in search of something; in the way that the city of Canterbury is a symbolic as well as a real destination; in its scepticism of authority; and just perhaps in the way that the film focuses on three people while Chaucer separates his characters into three distinct social classes, though the protagonists of A Canterbury Tale certainly don’t map directly onto Chaucer’s groups.

A Canterbury Tale does begin with direct allusions to Chaucer and the 14th-century: a shot of the text of The Canterbury Tales, and then a map in a prop-ancient style showing the road to the city (underlining the importance of place which will be paramount throughout), while a voiceover recites an excerpt from Chaucer in modernised language. To audiences in 1944, it might have looked for a moment as though it would be a dramatisation of his work, because Powell and Pressburger then move to a group on horseback, in medieval costume.

There is Merrie England music, a falcon (or perhaps a hawk) soaring through the sky… and then, in a now-famous match cut (very nearly as effective as Stanley Kubrick’s bone-to-satellite pairing a quarter of a century later in 2001: A Space Odyssey), the bird is replaced with a Spitfire aircraft. Less famous and less flashy, but equally important in confirming that the story is now jumping ahead many centuries, the next shot shows a modern (for 1944) soldier posed in a very similar way to one of the medieval riders.

“What would Chaucer’s pilgrims see today?” the voiceover asks, and the answer is that while some things have changed, some remain the same, an idea to which A Canterbury Tale returns repeatedly. Today, however (the voiceover adds), there’s also “another kind of pilgrim”… and now armoured vehicles come into the scene, drawing an explicit parallel between Chaucer’s motley assemblage sharing a common purpose in the 14th-century and those thrown together by the war effort in the 20th.

“We modern pilgrims see no journey’s end,” the voiceover continues—which may seem a surprisingly gloomy prognosis for a film released in the summer of 1944, if the comment is supposed to refer to the war; it would be over in less than a year. However, A Canterbury Tale is set a year earlier in 1943, at which point it would make more sense (though would this subtlety have been appreciated by audiences?). And in any case, the line could refer simply to 20th-century mobility, because we now see a train arriving at a station in blackout darkness. It’s a thoroughly modern scene, and the transition from the Chaucerian era is complete.

The first of the principal characters we meet is an American, US Army Sergeant Bob Johnson (John Sweet), arguing with the stationmaster (Charles Hawtrey, later a familiar fixture in the Carry On films). He has disembarked by mistake in the fictitious village of Chillingbourne, near Canterbury, believing it to be the city (“I know that in Canterbury I have to look out for a cathedral”). Already in this scene, with the main narrative now properly underway, many of the characteristics that permeate A Canterbury Tale are emerging: dialogue that is frequently witty without being jokey, for example, and the powerful visual employment of darkness with just a handful of people or objects discernible, complemented later in the film by an abundance of light-bathed scenes.

Bob will soon meet with the other two central characters, Alison (Sheila Sim) and Peter (Dennis Price). The film treats them as more or less equal co-leads, although Alison is a bit more prominent than the men. All are in Chillingbourne for different reasons, and all will eventually head to Canterbury together. Bob is actually stationed near Salisbury (another medieval cathedral city) but is going to meet a friend in Canterbury, while Alison is a “Land Girl” (a female agricultural worker replacing males who have joined the military) who has been assigned to work in the area and (unlike the two men) has fond memories of visiting it before the war. Peter—a cinema organist in civilian life, we later learn—is now a British soldier stationed just outside Chillingbourne.

Very near the beginning of the film, Alison’s attacked in the darkness by the “glue man”—a peculiar serial assailant who smothers women’s hair in glue. The three team up to try to identify him, and suspicion soon falls on Portman’s Colpeper, a wealthy local gentleman farmer, magistrate and antiquarian, recognised as a leader of the village and vocal in his love both for the area and for its history. He’s even rather anti-modern–criticising Bob’s love of the movies, saying that sitting in the cinema and passively watching is nothing like experiencing reality—and thus acts as a spokesman for the film’s arguments. In a lecture about the Pilgrims’ Way, for example, he repeats the point made by the opening voiceover about seeing the same world as our ancestors.

The hunt for the glue man is something of a MacGuffin, and exploring this idea of the present and past being interlinked is a much bigger concern for A Canterbury Tale (although the glue man’s motives do turn out to be rather implausibly linked to it). As so often with Powell and Pressburger, though, there are also sequences which seem to be in the film simply because they liked them. Among these, for instance, is a brilliantly shot “battle” fought by a group of young local boys (with Bob also on hand), cutting at one memorable moment to a little lad standing in a rowboat crying his eyes out, seemingly forgetting all about his grand-looking naval uniform and wooden sword. This passage of the film obviously does relate to the real war that is always in the background of A Canterbury Tale, and there is an exchange shortly afterwards that makes a political point: “Who are the isolationists?” one boy asks Bob, to which he replies “short-sighted folk”. But the whole section surely is just there for the sheer cinematic joy of it.

More obviously related to the film’s theme of the past and present intertwined is a scene where the protagonists meet the local blacksmith and wheelwright, pursuing decidedly un-20th-century crafts; this has an almost documentary feel, too, as if recording a disappearing way of life. Many local people appear in the film as well. But in A Canterbury Tale locations often play a bigger part than people, and it is in its celebration of them—both natural and man-made—that the film puts forward its vision of an England that exists almost outside time. It was shot in several Kent villages as well as Canterbury—territory familiar to Powell, who’d grown up in the area and attended the King’s School, Canterbury—although remarkably (because they are so completely convincing) the interiors of the cathedral are a studio set.

What human drama there is in A Canterbury Tale is really about the characters’ internal lives, their hopes and dreams and disappointments, rather than their relationships with one another. Everyone in the film is more or less likeable, even Colpeper despite some aspects of his personality; there are no threats or disagreements of any consequence; and the fact that none of the performers were stars or even particularly familiar actors meant Powell and Pressburger were spared the obligation of emphasising them.

For Price, Sim, and Sweet the film gave them their first credited roles—Sweet hadn’t even been an actor previously, and didn’t remain one for long—although Price (like Portman) did go on to have a long career on stage and screen, and Sim a shorter one. The performances of Sim (Alison), Sweet (Bob), and Portman (Colpeper) are the ones that hold the attention, with Price’s Peter a bit less memorable, though even with them you sometimes get a faint impression of artificially constructed characters slotted into an allegory rather than real, messy people.

In smaller roles, some of the stand-outs are Eliot Makeham as the organist of Canterbury Cathedral (terse at first, then warm when he learns that Peter also plays the instrument) and Harvey Golden as Bob’s American friend Sergeant Roczinsky (the film has cheerful fun with the supposed habits of the Yanks “over here”, including Bob’s observations that everything from the rivers to the blackberries is bigger in Oregon). Esmond Knight narrates and also makes a brief, disturbingly strange night-time appearance as Chillingbourne’s “village idiot”; for the much shorter (95-minute) US version of the film, Raymond Massey narrated instead and Kim Hunter—later a minor star—was inserted as Bob’s love interest, who in the UK version is only discussed and never seen.

Easily as dynamic as any of the performances is the music composed by Allan Gray, who had previously worked for Powell and Pressburger on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and would do so again on I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), though his score for The Red Shoes (1948)—perhaps the most celebrated of all their films–would be rejected.

From the “flying music” for the bird in the opening medieval scene to the little martial fanfares that constantly remind us of the wartime setting (and used to amusing excess in the boys’ battle scene), to the tongue-in-cheek “dramatic music” for the glue man, Gray matches the flavour of individual scenes perfectly, adding an extra dimension without obtruding. There is also some diegetic use of both popular and classical music, including an effective double appearance by Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor”: played on the organ in Canterbury Cathedral and then continued in the orchestration by Leopold Stokowski recently brought to a wider public by Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940).

Indeed, A Canterbury Tale employs at different points four kinds of music (choir, church bells, organ, hymn) which are inseparably tied to Christianity, and are expected to have the same associations for the audience as the medieval architecture of the cathedral: an aesthetic appreciation imbued with religious context, if not necessarily religious itself. These musical choices are thus intimately linked to the worldview of the film.

A Canterbury Tale wasn’t a great commercial success—it lacked star names, wasn’t easily reducible to a single compelling premise, and perhaps was simply too idiosyncratic. But it was well-received from the beginning. Writing in the News of the World, Ewart Hodgson opined that the plot “does not stand much examination, so flimsy and unreal is it, but such is the way the picture has been contrived that when you come out you won’t be critical on that score”.

He also called it “the most important and effective film contribution yet made to Anglo-American friendships”, although in the US itself, Variety’s anonymous writer concentrated on cinematic aspects, singling out the bird-to-Spitfire match cut for praise—“nothing more effective by way of a time transition shot has been conceived than the way [cinematographer Erwin Hillier] carries his audience through nine centuries in a few seconds”—as well as the performances, with Portman described as “splendid, restrained”. Since then, it has become regarded as one of Powell and Pressburger’s most important films, even if it is occasionally considered a little too odd for its own good.

Certainly, it’s eccentric even by their standards, but it does have much in common with their other output at the time.

Most obviously, there’s its functional propaganda goal. It idealises Englishness (and here it is very much Englishness, not Britishness—the film lacks the token Scots/Welsh/Irish characters that so many British films of the wartime era featured). It has many similarities to the more overtly propagandising One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), for example, with its emphasis on teamwork and the journey of a group as well as the way it shows people of different classes getting on happily. (Oddly enough, a church organist also makes a small but meaningful appearance in One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing as a symbol of Dutch resistance to the Nazis, playing the national anthem on the pedals so the Germans intruding into his church can’t tell who’s doing it.)

Like many of Powell and Pressburger’s films at the time, it also features positive interactions between the British and other cultures. Here we have the Americans; in 49th Parallel (1941) there were the Canadians, in Contraband (1940) the Danes, in One Of Our Aircraft the Dutch, and so on. This implicitly stresses the importance of Britain’s support from and obligations toward her allies, and indeed the film scholar Charles Barr (in British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction) has pointed out that every one of their first ten movies is “centred on a crossing of borders and an encounter between nationalities” (although sometimes these were Germans). Even Colpeper’s discussion of mountain climbing could be seen as relating the non-mountainous rural idyll of Chillingbourne to the wider world.

Pressburger called A Canterbury Tale a “crusade against materialism”, and Colpeper preaches the point explicitly. It is a kind of mystical pastoral: though the close-ups on people are effective, they are few, and more often the landscape and the sky are dominant in the frame. One shot of a horse and cart and a weatherbeaten mill against a big cloudy sky is outstandingly lovely.

Rural life is depicted as disrupted by war and modernity—when the film cuts from Alison riding peacefully through the countryside to armoured vehicles pushing and crushing their way through the vegetation, they seem alien, an invasion even though they are “ours”. But there is continuity as well, exemplified by the blacksmith and wheelwright, and the terrain is much bigger than any of them: the fecundity of rural Kent is almost overwhelming. Appropriately, the book seen on Colpeper’s desk entitled Soil and Sense was a text on maximising the fertility of the land.

There’s an element of nostalgia here. England was, after all, now a thoroughly urban, industrial nation; the agricultural workforce had fallen by almost a quarter between the mid-1920s and the beginning of the war. London was a hundred times bigger than the city Chaucer would have known. Andrew Moor (in Powell & Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces) intriguingly compares the filmmakers to the Gothic Revival architectural idealists of the 19th-century, seeking to reinstate a “purer”, older, less industrialised version of England, and such sentiments are given voice by Alison: “What wouldn’t I give to grow old in a place like this?” and later “Why should people who love the country have to live in big cities? Something is wrong.”

History is ever-present (tellingly, Alison’s fiancé—like Bob’s girlfriend, only mentioned, never seen—is an archaeologist). The Pilgrims’ Way is always lurking in the background, of conversations as well as shots, even in the way that Colpeper describes London as being “a day’s walk” (rather than by describing it as a ten-minute train journey, which is how most people at the time would have made the trip). The idea of a pilgrimage culminating in Canterbury is reiterated over and over in the film’s final section, set in the city; there are paired shots of marching soldiers and driven sheep, people filing into a cathedral service, the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with its second-line reference to “marching”.

Especially notable is a beautifully constructed shot where Peter’s climbing the steps in the cathedral towards the camera. Here, a line of schoolgirls in straw boaters appears behind him, entering from the left of the frame, then turning left to walk away from the camera down the length of the church, leaving Peter alone again on his mission to the organ loft. Peter and the girls are going in different directions, but they’re all seeking something in Canterbury, and people are as small against the cathedral’s stonework as they earlier were against the sky. A tour of the city with its busy streets and bombed-out buildings, a blimp floating overhead, is, in its way, as expressive as the landscapes.

Peter’s ascent through the cathedral is blatantly symbolic—he travels up wide stairs, then a narrow spiral staircase to reach the organ console, clearly representing some kind of spiritual elevation; he has, it turns out, always wanted to be a church organist himself rather than playing the instrument in a cinema. But there is no suggestion that Canterbury Cathedral, the epicentre of the Church of England, is the only place where something transformative is on offer, and indeed the scene is brought somewhat back to earth when the cathedral organist cheerfully (and a little improbably) recalls that he used to play the harmonium in a circus. Bob, meanwhile, reflects on the organ in his local Baptist church back in Oregon—presumably a much humbler establishment—while for Alison it is nothing in a church at all, but that old caravan, which might offer her salvation.

Most remarkable in A Canterbury Tale, though, is the way that the mythic and fabulous undercurrents of Powell and Pressburger’s work are so close to the surface, as they would be again shortly afterwards in I Know Where I’m Going! with its Scottish curse. When Colpeper remarks that “there are higher courts than the local bench of magistrates”, even though the film cuts to the cathedral in the distance seen from the train where he is speaking, it’s easy to believe that he is not necessarily talking only about the Christian religion, and Moor even compares the film to The Wizard of Oz (1939), where the group’s quest leads them to what they believe is magical—not religious—power.

While formal religion in itself is not a major concern of the film, a kind of animistic relationship with the natural environment is frequently suggested—especially in the character of Colpeper—and A Canterbury Tale strays quite often into the territory of what Robert Macfarlane calls the ‘English Eerie’.

Bob makes a personal connection with one of the old Chillingbourne men through a shared knowledge of wood; their conversation seems to imbue the material with mystery and potency, almost talismanic qualities. The local pub in Chillingbourne is the Hand of Glory, a reference to the preserved hand of a hanged man traditionally believed to have magical powers in rendering people motionless. Colpeper would certainly appreciate a Hand of Glory to keep people in the village, and Moor, in his book on Powell and Pressburger, suggests that Colpeper might himself have magical powers; perhaps, then, the glue is ritually symbolic? After all, glue stops things moving too…and when we see him lying prone in the grass of a field, he seems literally part of the land himself.

On one significant occasion, A Canterbury Tale flirts openly with the supernatural, when Alison hears horses, voices, and a lute in a field—echoes over the centuries of the Chaucerian pilgrims who opened the film. And there is something about the “village idiot” character, too, that suggests he might not be of our world.

Yet part of Powell and Pressburger’s mastery is that the film never quite loses its grip on realism either, even when the past is reappearing or when, in Canterbury, the narrative becomes more and more allegorical as the three main characters all receive miracles in different ways. The cathedral is transcendent, and yet the camera does not miss the bomb sites nearby. There is even a surprising, and very much of-the-moment, reference to marijuana.

There’s no denying that it’s a strange film. It’s so difficult to take the ostensible main storyline of the “glue man” seriously (or even believe that Powell and Pressburger took it seriously) and the frequent digressions into completely unrelated scenes can give it a disjointed feel. But this is also part of its charm—you truly never do know where it’s going to head next—and though its incorporation of the meditative, the mystical, and the magical into a quasi-realistic tale might be unsettling to viewers expecting something more conventional, it works. Saying that a movie is “like no other” might be something of a tired phrase, but with A Canterbury Tale, it’s true.

UK | 1944 | 124 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH