A CANTERBURY TALE (1944)

I admire the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, even though I haven't had the opportunity to write about many of their films on my blog (see I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING and THE 49TH PARALLEL). This film, inspired loosely by Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," was difficult to see until Criterion issued it on DVD this year. Like most of their films, it is hard to categorize, and it takes its own sweet time getting going, but it is well worth a little extra time and effort on the part of the viewer. The film opens with a little cinematic slight-of-hand: with a narrator talking about Chaucer's 14th century pilgrims, we see such a group on its merry way to the Canterbury Cathedral. Then, in a jump-cut which surely influenced Stanley Kubrick's similar shot in 2001, a soaring hawk, released by one of the pilgrims, becomes a bomber and suddenly we're in the present day, that is, the middle of WWII. The rest of the film covers a sort of pilgrimage taken by three people who are thrown together by circumstance in the small village of Chillingbourne, a few miles from Canterbury. One, an American sergeant (John Sweet) from a small town in Oregon, is heading to Canterbury at the end of his leave to meet up with a buddy and he mistakenly gets off the train one stop too early. A British sergeant (Dennis Price) is likewise on his way to Canterbury to be shipped out for a D-Day-like operation. A young woman from London (Sheila Sim) who has joined the Women's Land Army has been assigned to Chillingbourne to work for a local magistrate (Eric Portman). The three meet up late one night at the train station and as they head to Town Hall (to register and to find lodging) Sim is attacked in the dark by a figure who dumps glue in her hair. They discover that several women have been attacked by the Glue Man and when Sim suspects that the attacker may be her future employer, the two men agree to stay the weekend in the village and play detective with Sim.

The middle of the film, concerned with the "sleuthing," meanders quite a bit and is clearly more about development of characters and themes, primarily the ways in which the urban British woman and the hayseed American boy are like and unlike the villagers, but also about war and loss (Sim's soldier finace has been reported missing, and Sweet's girlfriend back home has quit sending him letters). Price's story is less melodramatic, but also tied up in loss: in his civilian life, he studied to be a church organist, but wound up playing organ in a movie theatre, and he expresses some frustration over that turn of events. Sim and Portman have a nice bonding moment in a field, and eventually, the three do put together enough evidence to confirm that Portman is indeed the Glue Man (his rationale is whimsical and a little sad). Finally, all four wind up on the train to Canterbury where all of them find redemption of sorts. It seems so little is at stake, but the finale is moving and effective. The film feels very modern with its rambling narrative, leisurely pace, and occasionally striking location phototography. And there is a startling line of dialogue late in the film in which Sweet and his buddy compare the British yen for tea to a habit for marijuana. Character actors Esmond Knight, Charles Hawtrey, and Freda Jackson have small roles. A delightful discovery, which TCM has scheduled this month. [DVD]