A Canterbury Tale
| A Canterbury Tale | |
|---|---|
| File:A Canterbury Tale.jpg A Canterbury Tale | |
| Directed by | Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger |
| Written by | Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger |
| Produced by | Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger |
| Starring | Eric Portman Sheila Sim Dennis Price Sgt. John Sweet |
| Cinematography | Erwin Hillier |
| Edited by | John Seabourne Sr. |
| Music by | Allan Gray |
| Distributed by | General Film Distributors |
Release dates | August 21, 1944 UK |
Running time | 124 min |
| Language | English |
A Canterbury Tale (1944) is a British film by the film-making team of Powell & Pressburger. The film takes its title from the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, and loosely uses Chaucer's theme of 'eccentric characters on a religious pilgrimage' to highlight the wartime experiences of the citizens of Kent. Made in black and white, it was the first of two collaborations between Powell & Pressburger and cinematographer Erwin Hillier.
Style and themes
The film's visual style is a mixture of British realism and Hillier's German Expressionist style. But this is harnessed to a neo-romantic sense of the English landscape. This sense that 'the past always haunts the present' in the English landscape was a powerful theme that would be mined by countless British novelists and film-makers from the 1960s onwards.
Described as 'morally weird but forever English', its characters, rare for mainstream cinema, play out their moral choices instead of merely verbalising them.
Story
The story concerns three young people: a British soldier, Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), an American soldier, Sergeant Bob Johnson (played by real-life G.I. Sergeant John Sweet), and a 'Land Girl', Miss Alison Smith (Sheila Sim). As the group arrive at the railway station in the fictitious small Kent town of Chillingbourne, late at night, the girl is attacked by a mysterious assailant who pours glue into her hair, before escaping. It transpires that this has happened several times before. The three decide to investigate the attack, enlisting the help of the locals, including several young boys.
They identify the culprit as a local magistrate, Mr Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), a gentleman farmer and pillar of the community, who also gives local history lectures to soldiers stationed in the district.
On a train journey to Canterbury a few days later, they find themselves in the same compartment as Mr Colpeper. 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.
Meanwhile, their own attitudes to their surroundings are changing. On arriving in the city of Canterbury, devastated by wartime bombing, all three young people receive "blessings" of their own. Miss Smith discovers that her boyfriend, believed killed in the war, has survived after all; Sergeant Johnson receives long-delayed letters from his sweetheart, and Sergeant Gibbs, who was a professional organist before the war, gets to play the music of J.S. Bach on the large organ at Canterbury Cathederal, before embarking to join his unit. He decides not to report Mr Colpeper to the Canterbury police, as he had planned to do.
Production
The film is notable for its many exterior shots showing the Kent countryside, as well as Canterbury itself. Many local people, including a lot of young boys, were recruited as extras for the extensive scenes of children's outdoor activities such as river 'battles' and dens. The crew were unable to get permission to film inside the Cathedral itself, so large portions of the cathedral were rebuilt in the studio - however, the change between the two settings is not noticeable in the film.
Reception
The film initially had very poor reviews in the UK press [1], and only small audiences. Powell was forced by the studio to completely re-edit the film for U.S. release, which also added U.S.-filmed "bookends" to the story. The film was fully restored by the British Film Institute in the late 1970s and the new print was hailed as a masterwork of British cinema. It has since been re-issued on DVD in both the UK and USA.
There is now an annual festival based around the film, in which film fans tour the film's locations. [2]
Several video artists have re-cut the more visionary sections of the film as video-art. [3]