A Canterbury Tale

This is a multilayered, erudite, passionate exploration of England's national character. The route Powell and Pressburger take for this rather difficult task is to follow John Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress'. During the second war a group of disparate people are thrown together one night at a deserted railway platform in Kent. Using a plot device of a mysterious, though harmless, assailant who preys upon women, P & P examines English country life, the Englishman's love for nature, the idisyncracies, the distrust of foreigners, the 'pubbing', the resilience, the faith in institutions (the church, the gentry), etc.

The scope of the movie is amazing, and in 2 hours it covers enormous ground. The entire thing is so skillfully and assuredly done that in spite of the absence of any stars and (almost) of a story, and the fact that John Bull is never my companion of choice in any desert island, I was riveted to this movie. Besides the acting, this effect was achieved also by Alfred Junge's brilliant art direction (I couldn't believe the Canterbury church was just a set) and William Hillier's black and white photography. Two scenes stand out - a bird 'turning into' an airplane signifying time going on ahead by a few centuries, and an armoured car breaking through bushes and undergrowth (a very 'Predator'-ish shot).

This is a must see.

Some of the Archers' films have moved and delighted me -- BLACK NARCISSUS, THE RED SHOES. Others have interested me but left me rather cold -- PEEPING TOM, TALES OF HOFFMANN. This one falls right in the middle. The wartime milieu, the surprisingly *dark* nighttime photography, the central characters, the supporting cast of Kentish country folk -- all these engaged me for about the first hour of the movie. But in the second hour, as the "Glue Man" theme became increasingly worn out and the prospect of "miracles" in Canterbury loomed larger, I felt more and more detached from the proceedings. Especially unwelcome was the churchy quality of the denouement. Still, I have no argument with the commenters who have praised the film so highly. So let me turn the denouement of my own commentary into a list of the positive impressions that stayed with me after "The End" appeared so unexpectedly on the screen.

First -- I loved the camaraderie that developed immediately among all the ordinary folks thrown together and forced to work as teammates for the common cause. (If war is good for anything, it must be that.) Second -- I liked the tall skinny American soldier and the difficulties and simple pleasures he found among the Brits -- I've been there, done that, and P&P captured the feeling very nicely. (Note: Bob Johnson's accent is quite authentic for a rural Oregonian, so stop complaining, you funny Commonwealth lot!). Third -- I enjoyed every minute that Sheila Sim was on camera. Finally -- that cut in the prologue, from the hawk to the fighter plane, was excellent indeed. (And yes, I'd bet my piggy bank that Stanley Kubrick got his idea for the bone-to-space station cut in 2001 from this very film.)

But wait, I realize that I do have to register one last complaint. I love black & white movies, so much that whenever I hear twentysomething kids whine that they can only watch movies in color, I am nauseated. And yet -- I wager that any filmmakers who purport to represent the beauty of the Kentish countryside on a summer day will truly achieve their goal only if they film in color. England's green and pleasant land just can't be painted in shades of gray.

After a dozen viewings or so I still rate this as one of my Top 20 favourites, the passing of time doesn't seem to lessen its brilliance, if anything it improves with age. The Carlton budget DVD out at the moment makes the black and white photography gleam even more now, so I wonder why the BBC have always shown such an inferior copy.

ACT is a pleasant inconsequential masterpiece, with no heavy points to labour, no axes to grind and for wartime not too many flags to wave. But it leaves you wishing that Olde England could've been better preserved from the elected savages in charge of us since, and that perhaps it wasn't so surprising that people were ready to defend such a country and its lifestyles to the death. The only thing Chaucer inspired in me in all of his tales was the desire to reach the end of the journey.

The story? Mysterious fetishist keeps pouring glue onto unsuspecting girls heads at night - 3 intrepid souls determine to find and unmask the weirdo, but vacillate when their moment comes. The four main characters weave in and out of the tale, moving it forward gently to the rather grand climax. But what about the Glueman himself - did he go back home to his reprehensible pastime or did he meet a sticky end? Did Bob get his marijuana? Did they manage to get the moths out of Allison's caravan? Did Peter ever stop playing on his organ?

Refreshing: 1/ A platonic relationship between three handsome men and one beautiful woman. 2/ The most violent scene is where the troops burst out clapping the Sgt. who repaired the slide projector. 3/ A basic plot premise so flimsy and yet so captivating.

A most profitable way of spending two hours.

Although I've heard that Michael Powell chose, over a skirt-slashing Colpeper, to instead have him be The Glueman, his choice is, I think, serendipitous. The Glueman is not just the (superficially, as most post-modern critics mistake about him and about so many other characters in earlier films - about which more later) repressed sexual pervert Glueman, but he's also the Clueman. 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. In a spot or two the plot plods, but then plodding was the pace of the Kentish countryside, so I think that it's only to our early third millennium sensibilities that it seems to plod. 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. The Yanks whom Wartime Britons recall were probably more like Mike Roczinsky, yet among those "overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here" American "invaders," among all those "brown jobs," were young men quite like Sweet's Bob Johnson. Dennis Price's manner is a bit too aristocratic for his portrayal of a sergeant, but on the whole Price's thespian gifts help him to carry off his role very well. Sheila Sim gives a perfectly iconic portrayal of a young woman of her time: bereaved but not crushed; proud yet considerate; tender yet not mawkish; vulnerable yet capable. 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. In the end the Glueman vanishes from the pilgrim's and our ken because he's accomplished his task of cluing and gluing the pilgrims to their past, to the mystical dimension of Being in their Own Time as that Being can only have come about by dint of their having touched their Past in their Present, which is the predicate of their harboring good hope for their Future. 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. In our present age of rapidly successive, plug-in and plug-out residential and professional transience - the first age of nigh-universal human rootlessness - 'A Canterbury Tale's' blessing is its acquainting us with our 1940's forebears' more permanent, more grounded sense of themselves and their place in the world and in time, a sense which they felt the war had put under threat and had hurled them and their world, willy-nilly, into unsettling uncertainty. It seems unlikely that we - our species - shall ever again know the quiet certainties, tranquility, and satisfaction of lifelong residence in, or near, our birthplaces. Until our time urgency meant for people something quite different from what urgency means for us. If people before our hyper-active, attention-deficited, more artificial time were not more "authentic," then they were certainly far less remote than we've become from Nature's cycles and temper.

'A Canterbury Tale's' charm is quiet, subtle, and in the end it's sensual, mystical, illuminating, and eternally dear. Pity that few have nowadays the time or the temper for such charm.

Perhaps this is more significant now than ever, this quaint tale of wartime Canterbury and the ancient pilgrims whose presence is still felt. Some of the symbolism feels a little clunky - does the heroine really have to have travelled to Canterbury previously with her boyfriend 'Geoffrey' (i.e. a Chaucer reference) and why is the Glue Man so fixated on causing havoc in the blackouts? John Sweet's accent and acting has caused some other comments - I found his character jarred a little but somehow by the end, he fitted in. And the ending is curiously touching. The whole film has the usual touches of brilliance you would associate with Powell and Pressburger. Good stuff.