A Canterbury Tale

Plot synopsis:
The story concerns three young people: British Army Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), U.S. Army Sergeant Bob Johnson (played by real-life Sergeant John Sweet), and a "Land Girl", Miss Alison Smith (Sheila Sim). The group arrive at the railway station in the fictitious small Kent town of Chillingbourne (filmed in Chilham, Fordwich, Wickhambreaux and other villages in the area), near Canterbury, late on Friday night, 27 August 1943. Peter has been stationed at a nearby Army camp, Alison is due to start working on a farm in the area, and Bob left the train by mistake, hearing the announcement "next stop Canterbury" and thinking he was in Canterbury.
As they leave the station together Alison is attacked by an assailant in uniform who pours glue on her hair, before escaping. It transpires that this has happened quite a few times before, to other women. Alison asks Bob if he could spend the weekend in Chillingbourne to help her solve the mystery. The next day, while riding a farm cart in the countryside, Alison meets Peter, who surrounds her cart with his platoon of three Bren Gun Carriers. Alison agrees to meet Peter again. The three decide to investigate the attack, enlisting the help of the locals, including several young boys who play large-scale war games.
The three use their detective skills to identify the culprit as a local magistrate, Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), a gentleman farmer and pillar of the community, who also gives local history lectures to soldiers stationed in the district. Alison interviews all the glue man's victims to identify the dates and times of their attacks. Gibbs visits Colpeper at his home and borrows the fire watch roster listing the nights Colpeper was on duty in the town hall, whilst a paper drive for salvage by Johnson's boy commandos lets Johnson discover receipts for gum used to make glue sold to Colpeper. The dates of the attacks correspond with Colpeper's night watches where he wore a Home Guard uniform kept in the town hall to carry out his attacks.
On a train journey to Canterbury on the Monday morning, Colpeper joins them in their compartment. They confront him with their suspicions, which he doesn't deny, and they discover that his motive is to prevent the soldiers from being distracted away from his lectures by female company and to help keep the local women faithful to their absent British boyfriends. In Colpeper's words, Chaucer's pilgrims travelled to Canterbury to "receive a blessing, or to do penance". On arriving in the city of Canterbury, devastated by wartime bombing, all three young people receive blessings of their own. Alison discovers that her boyfriend, believed killed in the war, has survived after all; his father, who had blocked their marriage because he thought his son could do better than a shopgirl, finally relents. Bob receives long-delayed letters from his sweetheart, who is now a WAC in Australia. Peter, a cinema organist before the war, gets to play the music of Johann Sebastian Bach on the large organ at Canterbury Cathedral, before leaving with his unit. He decides not to report Colpeper to the Canterbury police, as he had planned to do.

Tags: whimsical, romantic, cute, atmospheric, home movie

Review:
The use of black and white is glorious, ranging from the glimmer in the obscurest of shadows to sun-drenched hillside, and the totally unselfconscious reference to Chaucer in the opening sequence is in these days worth the price of admission alone.If you like gentle films - sweet-natured films - films with a deep affection for their subject - films that make you laugh and cry, but always smile - then I urge you not on any account to miss this one.
(I have not seen the American version.)This is a feel-good film of the very first order.The photography is geared towards presenting the glory of the English countryside, and beautifully conveys an England which was fast disappearing by the time war broke out.
Set in war time England the story follows 4 characters (2 soldiers, a woman and a local magistrate) as they eventually make a modern day pilgrimage to Canterbury.
Here's another rich and wonderful piece of movie-making from the Powell/Pressburger team--as well as a lovely little time capsule of WWII Britain: the land girls, small town England, and what real patriotism is all about (unlike the sleazy variety much of America and some of Britain are currently experiencing).
Beginning with a lovely link to Chaucer's tales, it uses a marvelous quick cut between like objects that may remind you of something Stanley Kubrick is now heralded for doing (nearly a quarter-century later!), it then moves ahead to tell the story of four people whose paths cross to a purpose.Full of quiet surprise and a lead character (Colpeper) who is enormously problematic, the film makes you look, listen, think and feel intently.
Three young people, an American G.I. named Bob Johnson (Seargant John Sweet), a British soldier, Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), and a young woman from London, Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), moving to the countryside for work.
Peter (Dennis Price) is a disillusioned organist whose career has been limited to playing in movie theaters and who is soon to ship out overseas.The three disembark a train together and venture toward the great cathedral city when Alison is attacked in the dark by a strange offender known locally as the "glue man." He's poured nasty glue all over her head.
Yes, he's vaguely sinister, but he provides the glue that diverts the film's younger, war-preoccupied characters from their immediate concerns, and he suggests the clues that connect them to the heritage (some of us Yanks know the words of 'Land Of Hope And Glory' because England/Britain is undeniably, in many respects, our Mother Country) that has shaped them and made them who they are - and to the Civilization for which they're fighting.Too many of today's critics obsess about the "Lesbian" farm woman whose character, in the 1940's, would have been ordinary and been regarded as being ordinary: a woman raised under the sterner discipline and mores of her day, with no-nonsense, no-b.s. values of virtue, obligation and hard work - and of getting to the point.
It's postmodernists' affectation to automatically suspect doughty, matter-of-fact women characters - any eccentric women characters whom their postmodernist Miss Jean Brodie nonsense has bent them to suspect of fitting their screwy postmodernist (i.e., most often Marxisant, but often also Romantic) worldview - in earlier films of being "Lesbians." This woman is, consummately, a farmer who has to consider pragmatically what all farmers have always had to consider: how to smartly, efficiently work their land to its top yield against time and weather, pests and parasites, poachers and market conditions; there's nothing "Lesbian" about any of her singleminded agrarian pragmatism, or about her unremarkable - for her day - country ladies' sartorial choice, or even about her puffing a cigarette.'A Canterbury Tale' isn't among the best of Powell & Pressburger's efforts; but it doesn't fall far short of their best.
Seldom has black & white cinematography managed, as it manages here, to communicate through chiaroscuro the pilgrims' unease, and through the blessed splendor of sunlit, cloud-garlanded vistas of the Weald of Kent their respite.As the Glueman strives to communicate the pace, sensibilities, and sensations of Chaucer's pilgrim's time, so too must we latter-day viewers accommodate our viewing of this film to the pace, sensibilities, and sensations of its period and setting: once we've done that - which demands of us no extraordinary effort - the legendary, enduring Powell & Pressburger magic works its spell.From the outset I found Sergeant Sweet's unaffected acting well-suited to the storytelling.
Eric Portman's Glueman is appropriately mysterious and mildly menacing and yet, in the ending we discover that he's all along been a benign agent of illumination, the neutral but never indifferent catalyst, the benevolent spur to the young people's sleuthing to know their present through their coming to touch their collective past; the Glueman is, if you think about his role in the narrative, rather God-like - or, if your prefer, rather Nature-like.What's lovely about the dénouement here is that it enchants without indulging in sodden kitschiness, and indeed that it enchants in spite of of its scant kitschy elements.
This message, to people whom wartime exigencies shifted brusquely about en masse as people had hitherto never shifted about, may have rung in 'A Canterbury Tale's' contemporary audiences a chord of sentimental longing and welcome reassurance.This is a thoroughly English film best appreciated when one knows that Powell grew up in rural Kent and that he loved his home county's loveliness as only a native can and does love eternally his childhood home - and the verities it imparts early to him.
The real story is about the journey of self-discovery undertaken by the central characters  a land girl, a GI, a tank commander and a village historian  and the people they meet along the way.In some ways the film can also be regarded as a look at English ways of life (from the point of view of a foreigner  screenwriter Pressburger was Hungarian).
As for the lead roles, (non-professional) John Sweet is good as the good natured American soldier Bob Johnson, but I find leading lady Sheila Sim's ultra posh voice a little grating.Despite what is apparently a fairly mundane setting, there is no shortage of spectacular images in A Canterbury Tale.
This is a delightful little movie, not as grand as other Pressburger/Powell efforts, but definitely recommended.The scene with Bach's Tocata & Fugue in Canterbury Cathedral has to be one of my favorite musical moments in film, right up there with "La Marseillaise" in Casablanca (1942) or Nicolas Cage singing "Love Me Tender" in Wild at Heart (1990)..
The immediacy of events was further shown by the sad sights Allison saw in Canterbury - the bombed-out buildings.The mystical element is handled so gently and gracefully that it can almost be missed at certain times, but it is an integral part of the film, so I hope everyone watches this movie closely.Well, I can't say any more without giving it away, but suffice it to say, it was a most satisfying experience.
As ever, Powell and Pressburger go against the accepted grain of the era, relinquishing any obvious elements of propaganda (as they did, quite controversially, with their preceding film, the equally satirical The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943), and producing a film that on the one hand seems to be a laboured attempt to smooth out relations between American and British troops in the run up to the Normandy invasion, while on the other hand offering a ironic comment on the nature of war and that air of unspoken tragedy that punctuates the drama and makes the destruction and the devastation of war comprehendible on an entirely personal level.In keeping with this notion, the only battles shown in the film are those that involve the children of the village, acting out the supposed thrill of the battle in such a way as to make light of the inherent absurdities and childishness of it all.
Likewise, the ending of the film, which seems to suggest the noble spirit of war, with its "Onward Christian Soldiers" and the allusions to the Canterbury Pilgrims - as uniformed men and boys march in procession through the streets - also ties in with the propaganda element, and yet, features a subtle-subversion on this same theme in a way that may have been missed by the majority of viewers at the time the film was released.
Through Powell and Pressburger deny us the sight of any actual combat, they don't shy away from showing us the aftermath of the battle; with the sequences set within Canterbury itself making great use of the recent destruction of the Baedeker Raids of May and June, 1942; which itself suggests another theme of the film in the idea of history, or indeed, conservation.
Again, it is that universal connection to time and place that binds the characters beyond the recognisable differences of nationality, gender and generation, informing the tone of the narrative and suggesting a further interpretation pertaining to the past (and of letting go of the past and embracing the present).These ideas are expressed most clearly in the character of the American soldier, played here by the real-life U.S. Sgt. John Sweet, with his slow, Dylan like-drawl and keen delivery going towards the creation of a character that is honest and entirely genuine in his thoughts.
There's also a great sense of warmth and pathos to these characters, moving from moments of light comedy to more affecting moments of drama and intuitive character observation as we return to that idea of the past and how the location binds the characters, regardless of their superficial differences.Throughout the film, the characters cling to old memories of people and places, never realising that there are experiences to be cherished in the here and now; even more so given the life and death implications of the war itself.
You could perhaps argue that it lacks the imagination or epic-spectacle of the later films, like A Matter of Life and Death (1946) or The Red Shoes (1948) - still two of the greatest works of British cinema - but in my opinion A Canterbury Tale remains a minor masterpiece in its own right, and seems to be something of a thematic companion piece to director Michael Powell's earlier work, The Edge of the World (1937)..
This is a patriotic war film shot at a time of National Emergency, so don't expect any complexity in the characters of the GI, the Sergeant and the Land Girl.
The GI, the Sergeant and the Land Girl resolve to find the culprit.All roads lead to Canterbury, where the Cathedral oversees the resolution of the mystery and of the disappointments in the characters' lives, before the soldiers set off on a more dangerous pilgrimage.In the end, the plot is unbelievable, the character of Culpepper the magistrate unfathomable, the symbolism of the Cathedral laid on with a trowel - yet, why is this such a satisfying film?
The English Countryside is ravishing throughout.This film subtly highlights the values being fought for, the personal values, the village way of life, the spirit exemplified by the history of the Canterbury Pilgrims and of the Cathedral itself.
I'll take a guess that if you liked "The Station Agent", you might just go for "A Canterbury Tale", recently released as part of a Powell & Pressburger DVD box set.At first glance the various parts of this highly unusual film seem shoehorned in together, but "A Canterbury Tale" can be seen as a sort of genie in a bottle, where the more you watch, the more you see to love and admire.
It's a complete bubble in time, but which has meaning, and which transcends 'period' clothing and black and white photography, and stiff accents.The small pleasures of the film build progressively with the charm of the locale to invite you in, to make you care what happens to the lead characters.
Some wonderful cinematic moments, no less than you'd expect from a Powell & Pressburger film: the Kent countryside, shimmering even in black and white; the GI greeted from his hotel window by a boy on top of a hay cart; the intensity of Colpeper as he talks about the Pilgrim's Way, and the way the light falls on the girl's face as she is drawn into his story; the marvellous Kentish accents – largely lost today; the moving shots of the majestic Canterbury cathedral, standing strong in the background of the empty, bomb-destroyed lots, with signs indicating what the businesses were – a town still alive despite the desolation.
It takes place in a quiet corner of England, near Canterbury, some time after the Americans have joined the Second World War. Four characters - a middle-aged Englishman of culture and breeding, a land girl from London who hankers after country life, a suave and cynical English Sergeant from London, and an American Sergeant from Oregon - take their own pilgrimage to Canterbury.The time is late summer, and the lush Kent countryside basks under warm skies.
But it took a long time for me to work out where the story was going.Much of the film concerns itself with a somewhat amiable mystery, as three visiting "pilgrims" – an American soldier (John Sweet), a farm girl (Sheila Sim), and a London man (Dennis Price) – attempt to identify the notorious "Glue Man", a peculiar local criminal who attacks women with glue.
A message worth broadcasting in 1944: the things that make us human (and British) do not change.Not snobbery or class, but rather something almost ethereal, poetic, a beauty in good nature.This is a gentle, even sentimental, film that affects the viewer because it talks of decency and good manners, of simplicity and good nature.Seemingly plot less until the last 15 minutes, excepting the MacGuffin of a man who glues girls' hair, and so inspires the three strangers to investigate, the last 15 minutes tie all the pieces up miraculously.Worth watching as a time capsule - it is hugely evocative.Essential viewing for anyone serious about film - outstanding..
There's nothing wrong with a slow pace but, when the story begins to meander and perhaps lose sight of its purpose or intentions (or, at least, appears to) then audience goodwill can suffer.Overall, though, this is a film worth watching, even if only to get an understanding of what it meant to be British back then, and as a reminder of a way of life that is no more..
What I mean by that is, it is not (narratively) a film that I would bother with ordinarily.However, there are some good points and reasons worth thinking about, if you're deciding to watch it.The cinematography is really quite lovely; the landscapes are shot in romantic fasion, almost poetically and the locations are a great tribute to the traditional notions of what England should be.
Here is of course in the beginning a reference to Chaucer's Canterbury tales and pilgrims, and it recurs a few times later in the film, but the realism is absolute all the way, leading you straight into the timelessness of the cathedral like into another dimension of glorious infinity..
He is motivated neither by jealousy at losing a girlfriend to a soldier (which would probably have been the most common guess in 1944) nor by some bizarre sexual fetish (which would probably be the most common guess today).Powell and Pressburger were concerned to encourage wartime Anglo-American friendship (a theme they also dealt with in a later film, "A Matter of Life and Death"), but the character of Bob does not seem particularly calculated to endear the British public to their transatlantic guests.
Both the young sergeants knew that they were likely to be fighting on the mainland of Europe soon.By the time the film was released in England, a year later in August 1944, the picture was very different: British and American troops were racing towards the Rhine, the Russians had broken into Germany and the Japanese were retreating in the East.
During World War II, a British soldier (Peter Gibbs), a land girl (Alison Smith) and an American GI (Bob Johnson) all come together in a small town near Kent, on the road to Canterbury.
The leisurely story includes some typically eccentric Powell/Pressburger touches, from some acerbic comments about movie-going to the peculiar "Glue Man" plot, though nothing comparable to the mystical-romantic heights of their subsequent film, I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING.
There is probably a reference to a particular Chaucerian character here, which sadly went straight over my head.Into this town arrives a US soldier who gets off at the wrong station, and a British woman from the city who has come to work as a land girl for the war effort.
Despite serving as a propaganda statement for war-weary Britons, "Canterbury Tale" is a timeless source of inspiration.Set on the eve of D-Day, a spirited "Land Girl" named Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), an American GI named Bob Johnson (real-life Yankee GI John Sweet) and British soldier Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) are train passengers who wind up stranded at night in a small Kent town on the road to fabled Canterbury, UK​.
His unmasking by our protagonists as the 'Glue Man' comes as no real surprise, but seemingly his motivation is only about assuring our connection with the land and its history, despite being himself irredeemably misogynistic to our modern eyes.The final act, as the foursome complete their pilgrimages to Canterbury on the iron road, is a revelation; As they, and we, are propelled closer to the imposing Cathedral, the characters' stories are completed: Colpeper is set to do penance by turning himself in to the Police, Peter is told he was the instrument for this but instead gets a blessing of his own, Bob finally receives his girl's letters, (posted from Australia, "She's joined the WACs!"), and Alison is similarly blessed.
The last shot of the film is a view of Canterbury Cathedral under a towering sky from a nearby hilltop.For a wartime movie about how young people's lives are affected by the war it must have been imperative that the ending should be uplifting, but for this viewer who wasn't around at the time it was a big disappointment.