The directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is often credited with making the best British films of all time. Active in the forties and fifties, they made more than a handful of very famous (and very British) films: Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Tales from Hoffmann, A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes… Some people favor Blimp, some Hoffmann. I love A Matter of… and The Red Shoes. Black Narcissus features a striking and monumental Himalayan convent built—mountains and all—in a soundstage! The Powell-Pressburger films are visually compelling, ring of mythic themes, feature complex but all-ages stories, and exist in a world where the grandeur and beauty of life is just slightly elevated and artificial. They are often wartime films about a Britain worth fighting for and/or magnificent escapist fantasies.
I have a new favorite from Powell and Pressburger: 1944’s idyllically enigmatic A Canterbury Tale.
Suitably, the film starts with a recital of the first eighteen lines of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century epic, The Canterbury Tales. Let me tell you—we literature folk look for any excuse to rattle off those eighteen lines of lilting Middle English. Sadly, the man we hear reading them here has chosen to place his pronunciation somewhere straddling Middle and Modern English, with the result that it will make lit-folk cringe to hear him…and then recite them loudly and correctly to any and all who can hear them (or just themselves).
After an brief unnecessary prologue of medieval pilgrims as “to Caunterbury they wende,” the real story kicks off. But it’s a lackadaisical, thin, and peculiar story about three young people (an American GI, a British sergeant, and a London shopgirl come to work as a farm laborer) who walk around a town five miles from Canterbury and leisurely solve the strangest crime spree in all fiction: the reign of the Glue Man. This odd plot—such as it is—was not something critics of the time could get past, and they drubbed the film. Over the past eighty years, though, it has become a widely and passionately loved work of classic cinema.
Because the plot, while odd, is incidental. This is not a story about the Glue Man. (No one has quite worked out the point of the Glue Man story at all.) Instead, it’s light and music and faces and architecture and the theme of pilgrimage as our fascinating characters finally enter Canterbury—for a triumphant, soaring ecstasy of a finale. But since this is a tale of pilgrimage, its not the destination that takes precedence. The bulk of the movie takes place five miles away as our three heroes—and a middle-aged gentleman farmer/local historian—make tentative steps in their own individual inner journeys…which are also their collective journey.
Each character is a lovely mixture of contrasting traits, and we grow fonder and fonder of them as they form an intense but temporary fellowship. (Again: it’s a pilgrimage story.) It may be the very first “hang movie,” where the bulk of the joy and purpose of the film is to spend time with interesting personages. It’s all so delicate and beautiful and unrushed. The relationships between the four characters twist and change, as do their senses of their own selves.
So what if the American can’t act. They wanted a real serviceman, and the army would only sanction the use of an amateur. By the end, it doesn’t matter. What does matter? Rambling conversations about what time of year to cut down each type of tree. The way light enters windows—or not. The dignity given to the children. Whether we know a miracle when we see it. But never the identity of the Glue Man.
When the characters finally arrive in Canterbury to their separate blessings and penances, the build of the emotional ground their walking has become so layered and precious that everything has meaning. It is a sustained fanfare of an ending that challenges ideas of realism in the characters and the audience. Their/our time spent in Canterbury Cathedral feels exactly like being in church.
There exist two versions of the film: British and American. As you can imagine, the one edited for Americans is quicker, cheesier, and more educational about Britain during the war. Don’t watch that version. (I honestly don’t know if it’s even available these days.) If your film starts with infographics, you’ve gotten the wrong one!
Films like A Canterbury Tale are an ordeal for me as a critic. I want to impart a knowledge of their power and beauty…but they’re created through the accumulation of so many often-secondary things that it feels impossible to express. I spent a while resigned to the fact that I couldn’t review it well enough, but I couldn’t leave you out in the cold. And that suggests an image that might capture the film more clearly: it is like settling down before a warm fire next to some affable strangers after arriving at your mid-trip accommodations. It is such a singluar and unexpected film!