In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
Propaganda films may have a bad reputation, but they’re really no different from any other type of film—some are great, some are terrible, and most lie between those two extremes. The filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as “The Archers,” made a series of propaganda films in the 1940s that were less about battlefield heroics and more about their shared love of England, so their subject matter was not the fight itself but what was worth fighting for. Spoiler alert: that would be the traditional values of the English countryside, which are apparently superior to those of people who live in cities.* One of the stranger yet remarkably powerful films in this series is their 1944 A Canterbury Tale, which wasn’t much of a hit with either critics or the public upon first release but has since been recognized as a classic of British cinema.
It’s easy to see why contemporary audiences would have been confused by A Canterbury Tale, which opens with a re-enactment of some 14th-century pilgrims, accompanied by a reading (by Esmond Knight, who also plays a British soldier and the so-called “Village Idiot”) of an excerpt from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Just as you start to wonder if you mistakenly chose a film meant for the educational market, a hawk becomes a fighter plane, the verse becomes modern, and we’re in the England of 1944 where we will see the stories of three young pilgrims who come to Canterbury on their own quests.
The modern story is set mostly in Chillingbourne, a fictional small town in Kent near where Sgt. Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), a theatre organist drafted into the British Army, is stationed. Land girl Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), a London shop assistant in her previous life, arrives and is waiting to be assigned a job as a substitute for the many men serving in the armed forces. Sgt. Bob Johnson (Sgt. John Sweet), who serves in the American military, arrives at Chillingbourne by accident after getting off a train too soon.
Each has an issue they’re dealing with: Alison’s boyfriend is missing in action, Bob hasn’t heard from his girlfriend in weeks, and Peter aspired to be a classical musician before settling for a theater job and a superficial life. Over the course of a weekend, they bond while trying to solve a mystery about a series of “glue attacks” in which someone wearing a military uniform throws glue in the hair of young women who have the temerity to be out and about at night. They also fall under the spell of the “Old Trail” that centuries before brought pilgrims to Canterbury.
The saying that pilgrims come to Canterbury to receive a blessing or a penance which is particularly relevant to the fourth central character: Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), a gentleman farmer and magistrate in Chillingbourne. He loves the area and wants others to appreciate it but also thinks he has the right to enforce his version of morality on other people through acts that could well be regarded as criminal. He’s the most complicated character in the film and the one that causes me the greatest conflict, because clearly the filmmakers want us to see him as acting for the greater good, yet his literal actions are disgusting and his attitudes misogynist.
A Canterbury Tale was The Archers’ first collaboration with cinematographer Erwin Hillier, a German-Jewish artist and cinematographer who worked at UFA studios in Germany before emigrating to Britain to work at Gaumont Pictures. His mastery of black and white cinematography is a big part of what makes A Canterbury Tale work: his camera captures equally well the the everyday reality of a life in a city heavily damaged by bombing, the idyllic charms of an English small towns and the rural countryside, and the mystical spirit of England that makes the film more than just a naturalistic portrait of a country at war.
If you need a reminder that movies are a business, look no further than the sadly butchered version of this film released in America (excerpts are included in this release). The story was reshaped in a flashback structure featuring Bob Johnson recalling his wartime experiences to the added character of his wife (Kim Hunter), and includes Hollywood-style music and narration by Raymond Massey. Apparently the studio thought American audiences wouldn’t be interested in a film unless American characters (and a romance) were centered. Just another reason to be glad you live in a time when you can watch the film in its original version and make your own decisions about what you are interested in. | Sarah Boslaugh
* Similar valuing of small towns and rural areas over those of city folk are evident in American propaganda movies from this period as well. It’s a mystery to me why this view is so popular since cities are the engines of commerce and innovation, and their contributions to the national treasury are often keeping rural areas afloat. But movies of this type are about feelings, not facts or logic, and for some reason equating national values with non-urban areas is attractive to a lot of people.
Spine #: 341
Technical details: 124 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.33:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD (2 discs)
Extras: audio commentary by film historian Ian Christie; excerpts from the American release with Kim Hunter; video interview with actress Sheila Sim; short documentary “A Pilgrim’s Return” about actor John Sweet; short documentary “A Canterbury Trail” about a group of people visiting the film’s sites; 2001 video installation piece “Listen to Britain” by artist Victor Burgin; 1942 short documentary “Listen to Britain” by Humphrey Jennings; CD booklet with essays by Graham Fuller, Peter von Bagh, and actor John Sweet.
Fun Fact: The bomb craters you see in Canterbury are real: the city was one of several targets of Germany’s “Baedeker bombings” aimed not at military installations but areas of historical and cultural relevance. Many locals were also included in the Chillingbourne scenes, which were shot in several villages in Kent.
Parting Thought: There are several surprisingly modern feminist elements in A Canterbury Tale, including the character Prudence Honeywood (a hops farmer played by Freda Jackson who chose the single life over marriage and could easily be read as lesbian), Alison’s revelation that she and her boyfriend had been sleeping together before marriage, and Bob’s remark to Allison that she “needs about as much help as a Flying Fortress” (the Boeing B-17). But the central character of Colpeper, who represents the old values, is a genteel misogynist who commits violent acts under cover of night, yet we’re clearly meant to like him. What to make of this odd juxtaposition?
