This is my passing appreciation for ‘A Canterbury Tale’ (1944) by
Powell and Pressburger, at once a war film and at once a peace film, an odd and
mystical sort of film (I later read that Xan Brooks described it as a ‘tubercular
saint,’ and I thought that was so accurate for the delicate strangeness of the
film, even if it also sounds like the name of a Rolling Stones song haha). Filmed
during World War II with a real American serviceman (Sgt. John Sweet) playing
one of the key characters, ‘A Canterbury Tale’ has enough in it to read as a
propaganda sort of picture, a lens on the deep and enduring alliance between
Britain and her strong transatlantic neighbour in such a time of need. And yet
it feels free of this, mostly due to the American serviceman (as sweet as his
surname belies, a charmingly straightforward, modestly Midwestern friendly type)
very much at home in the Kentish village, and also due to the literary,
timeless feel of Emeric Pressburger’s rambling script whose gentleness is
lifted by Michael Powell’s subdued but vividly moving direction.
In fact, throughout the whole film, though everything is immersed in
the presence of soldiers in the middle of a war – and even when in the very
beginning, the soft hills are almost rudely violated by the relentless onslaught
of heavy tanks – there’s an hazy anxious disconnect that is detached from the
conflict, as if it’s hardly happening (the only conflict, in fact, is depicted
in summertime light, boys playing pirates on the river banks). Or maybe that
even though it’s very much happening, there's something larger and more lasting
that binds humanity, and keeps us alive and comfortingly close to one another
(and all this despite the minor plot line hiccups). Have you ever read 'North
Coast Recollections' by the equally English John Betjeman? “Then pealing out
across the estuary / The Padstow bells rang up for practice-night / An
undersong to birds and dripping shrubs. / The full Atlantic at September spring
/ Flooded a final tide-mark up the sand, / And ocean sank to silence under
bells, / And the next breaker was a lesser one / Then lesser still. Atlantic,
bells and birds / Were layer on interchanging layers of sound.” It’s a little
like that, I feel.
In summary, three characters (Sheila Sims, Dennis Price, and Sweet)
become pilgrims of a kind as they individually come to fictional Chillingbourne
near Canterbury, suspended in a romantic rural England as they become caught up
in a very weird, harmless little mystery surrounding Mr. Colpeper (the always
arresting Eric Portman) who is so desperate to preserve the past. Each of the three
pilgrims discover they are each searching for a kind of secret blessing of
their own, linked together as new friends. But even as we walk through the city’s
very real and very fresh ruins, and even as a battalion must march their way
past the Cathedral, each scene heart-wrenching and quietly distressing to
witness, there’s a dreamy sweetness to the idyllic landscape (that ‘garden of
England’), to the reassuring sounds of the church organ and bells and the
circling choral presence of Chaucer that suggests a peaceful England of the
past, somehow of the present, and perhaps of the anxiously optimistic future),
as the Land Girl and two sergeants find a humble, deeply quiet and provincial
delight – salvation maybe – in a strange, familiar place. An unusual but
terribly lovely, poetic film Xo
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