A Canterbury Tale, Great Britain, 1944

Written, Directed and Produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Cinematography Erwin Hillier
Edited by John Seabourne
Music composed by Allan Gray; conducted by Walter Goehr
Production Design Alfred Junge
Assistant Director George Busby
Production Manager George Maynard
Period Advisor Herbert Norris
Recorded by C.C. Stevens and Desmond Dew
Exteriors Recorded by Alan Whatley

With Sheila Sim Alison Smith Eric Portman Thomas Colpeper Dennis Price Peter Gibbs John Sweet Bob Johnson Esmond Knight Narrator / Seven-Sisters Solider / Village Idiot Production Company The Archers Details 124 minutes, Black & White, Monaural, English

The collection of works created by Powell and Pressburger contains several ostentatious treasures (The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp); a couple of smaller, but perfectly cut, gems (I Know Where I’m Going!); and the occasional curio. Because of its peculiar plot and often-directionless religiosity, A Canterbury Tale definitely belongs to the third category – but that doesn’t disqualify it from being a classic of British wartime cinema and a perpetually re-watchable pleasure. Its eccentric story sees three young service people – Alison Smith, a sophisticated shop-turned land girl; Sergeant Bob Johnson, a good-hearted GI on leave; and Sergeant Peter Gibbs, an erstwhile organist with upper class origins – arriving, en route for Canterbury, at a fictitious town in Kent. As they leave its blacked-out train station, an unidentifiable figure in army uniform accosts Smith and inexplicably pours glue in her hair. Learning that this is the eleventh attack by ‘The Glue Man’, they, perhaps improbably, resolve to discover his identity and solve the mystery of his motives. Having done so, the trio – whom we are invited to view as 1940s pilgrims – travel with the criminal to Canterbury, where they all, the culprit included, receive an unexpected blessing, extending the parallel with pilgrims of the Late Middle Ages.

The film’s plot, however, is always secondary to its atmosphere, which – ethereal, reverential and quietly unnerving – is very much a product of Tale’s idyllic setting and odd status as a war-free war film, but endlessly enhanced by some technically superb filmmaking, including a magnificent match cut between a fourteenth century falconer’s hawk and a World War II aeroplane that becomes shorthand for all of mankind’s progress in the years between, and (as Ian Christie points out on the audio commentary) so obviously inspired Stanley Kubrick’s iconic cut between a bone and a twenty-first century space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Equally effective are the occasions, late in the film, when the progress of the camera through the long, low arches around Canterbury causes a circle of shadow to frame Canterbury Cathedral, brilliantly mimicking the effects of an iris device. These moments are stunning, and cause the viewer to gaze aghast at the beauty onscreen, just as the main characters are wont to stop and gaze aghast at the beauty of the cathedral.

Originally intended for release in the months preceding the Normandy invasions, one of Tale’s most obvious aims was to inspire affection between the Allied populations, and it is the film’s streak of charming and unchallenging comedy of Anglo-American misunderstandings that most clearly reveals its propagandist purposes. There is a neat reversal of the clichéd complaint that American visitors always assume the UK is so small everyone in it knows everyone else when Esmond Knight says to John Sweet, ‘I have a brother [in America] … name of Isaac Wells. Maybe you know him!’ and a running gag about Sergeant Johnson’s stripes being on upside down. Whether these gentle jokes, or the film as a whole, did anything to improve contemporary transatlantic relations is difficult to surmise, but it is easier to imagine that the film reinforced, for those members of a war-weary English population who saw it, the Blakean ideal of an enduring England forever untroubled by change (or Nazis). In the scenes in which Johnson enlists the detective services of two herds of local children, Pressburger and Powell (who was born in Kent and educated at The King’s School, Canterbury) create intoxicating images of those impossibly bucolic childhoods one sees in so many British films, but doubts were ever actually experienced. In watching them, as when watching much of the movie, it is difficult to avoid the idea that it is perhaps its appeal to Anglophiles that is Tale’s strongest selling point today.

A further selling point is the all-round excellence of this DVD. Criterion’s customary attention to quality and near-exhaustive extras are all in evidence: the new high-definition digital transfer makes Erwin Hillier’s shadows sharper and his Kentish landscapes more evocative than they are likely ever to have looked, and the abundance of featurettes and essays shames the sparse (or non-existent) extras generally offered on the region 2 releases of Powell and Pressburger classics available in their native Britain. Of particular distinction is Humphrey Jennings’s free-form short Listen To Britain, rightly referred to in its introduction as ‘a landmark of the British documentary movement’; its inclusion means the DVD delivers two seminal, if idiosyncratic, explorations of Britishness in wartime, one fictional and one factual.

The set, though, is not flawless. A failure on its initial release, Tale was re-cut, shortened and shorn of much of its Chaucerian context for the American market, and the complete US version of the film would have made a fascinating extra. As it is, we have only the two specially shot scenes that bookend the American cut, and these pique a desire to watch it in full that the set cannot satisfy. Also, there is no trailer, and so no opportunity to compare the way in which the movie was originally marketed to audiences with how it is enjoyed by them today. These, though, are just the quibbles of the completist, and not intended to deter any prospective purchasers. This is a fine film – often unfairly overshadowed by the more accessible entries in an oeuvre filled with fine films – and here it has been given a splendid showcase on DVD. With A Canterbury Tale, as almost always with a Criterion release, provided he or she is unperturbed by the price, no cineaste is likely to be disappointed by the product.

Contributor details

Scott Jordan Harris is a writer and freelance critic from Great Britain. His blog, which evangelises the joys of great films, can be seen at http://apetrifiedfountain.blogspot.com.