Burl reviews A Canterbury Tale! (1944)

Cor blimey it’s Burl, here with a picture set in Blighty right smack in the middle of the war! It’s a Kentish sort of a film, one of the extraordinary works by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, also known as the Archers! Ha ha, I’ve long enjoyed their work: pictures like The 49^th Parallel, I Know Where I’m Going, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, The Tales of Hoffmann and the fantastic A Matter of Life and Death, are all great favourites!

But I’d never seen A Canterbury Tale before, and knew it only in the way Powell, in his lengthy autobiography, had characterized it: their first failure! Ha ha, in any case, in a very eccentric filmography it’s certainly among their most eccentric pictures! It’s also among their most personal, seeing it was shot in Kent, the area in which Powell grew up and for which he had great nostalgic fondness!

Perhaps it was the combination of rose-coloured wistfulness and wartime weirdness that put audiences off the picture, but I have a feeling it was just a tremendously difficult picture to market, and that the title led people to erroneously but reasonably assume it was a literature-based period piece! But the Chaucer-speak and olde-tyme pilgrim footage come only in the first few minutes of the picture; the rest is a contemporary story of modern-day pilgrims who, for most of the story, don’t even realize they are pilgrims! Ha ha!

We have three principal characters-cum-pilgrims who find themselves in a village just outside Canterbury, in which, wouldn't you know it, a glue man is on the loose! American soldier Sergeant John Sweet, who looks like a kid in a Bruce Weber photograph and speaks in a high-pitched drawl, plays Sergeant Bob Johnson! He comes off as slightly dim and provincial at first, but quickly emerges a likeable and savvy sort! Ha ha, they don’t come folksier! A land girl, in Kent to take on some of the farming work that needs doing and played by Sheila Sim from the even loonier Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, is a victim of the glue man on her first night in town! And there’s an English soldier played by Dennis Price from Tower of Evil, who, in civilian life, is a cinema organist with a  secret dream!

These three characters take it upon themselves to spend the week-end solving the mystery of the glue man! A fourth character, a local squire played by Eric Portman from We Dive At Dawn, comes under suspicion of being the glue man almost immediately! Each of the investigating trio have their own moments of deductive brilliance in solving the riddle, and the local boys, who have become martialized as boys will in wartime, are conscripted to help out!

What is a glue man, you may be wondering? Ha ha, it’s a man who, in a crazed bid to maintain traditional English values, runs around under cover of darkness and rubs glue in the hair of young women keeping company with soldiers! While the mystery of the glue man’s identity is never very compelling (ha ha, it’s the squire!) there are several compelling and even suspenseful sequences associated with it!

But the meat of this strange and beautiful film is not the glue man mystery, but the pilgrimage to Canterbury! In the last act of the picture all four main characters share a train compartment to the famous cathedral town to receive their various blessings, or, in the case of the glue man, not receive them! Ha ha! The ending works extremely well thanks to the care Powell and Pressburger took in the long, unhurried set-up, and it’s a marvelous piece of work! One regrets the inclusion of the village idiot, however, and scratches one’s head at the glue man and his motivation!

There are fantastic scenes scattered throughout, like the conversation about wood between Sergeant Bob and a local logsman! As they had done before in The Edge of the World and did again later in I Know Where I’m Going, the Archers succeed in making myth and magic of their location, with the extra effort from Powell, given his personal connection to Kent, at times a little over-apparent! Perhaps this is why it failed on its initial release! This is easily forgiven, however, and the picture will work its magic on just about anyone who gives it a shot! It’s not my favourite Powell & Pressberger, but it’s up there! I give A Canterbury Tale three blackout curtains!