A Canterbury Tale
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1944)
It starts with a goof. The screen displays Chaucer’s prologue’s opening lines; the voiceover reading them says, ‘From which vertú engendred is the flour’, even though the on-screen text shows (correctly) ‘Of which …’ Once you know who the voice belongs to, you may think differently about this slip of the tongue: Esmond Knight lost his sight when badly injured at the Battle of the Denmark Strait in 1941 – according to Wikipedia, he ‘remained totally blind for two years, though he later regained some sight in his right eye’. If you feel it was still careless of Powell and Pressburger not to pick up Knight’s mistake, learning of the circumstances in which they made A Canterbury Tale should change your mind. The Archers had more important things on theirs: ‘The film was shot throughout the county of Kent not long after the Baedeker raids of May-June 1942, which had destroyed large areas of the city centre of Canterbury’ (Wikipedia again). In Michael Powell’s own words (in A Life in Movies: An Autobiography (1986)), his and Pressburger’s one-of-a-kind drama is ‘a morality play in which three modern pilgrims to Canterbury receive their blessings’. A Canterbury Tale is also so thoroughly a World War II film that it’s rather a miracle it got made at all.
The opening sequence, with folk in medieval costume on horseback in the hills above Canterbury, climaxes in images of a bird of prey, shown first in close-up then in long shot in the sky. The latter shot segues into one of a different airborne creature, a droning war plane. The voiceover, now speaking Powell and Pressburger’s own rhyming couplets, compares and contrasts the landscapes of Chaucer’s time and six centuries later. The medieval company is succeeded, emphatically, by the announcement that now ‘Another kind of pilgrim walks the way!’ and a military tank crosses the screen. Cut to a country railway station – Chillingbourne – after dark, one Friday evening in late August. Three passengers alight from a train: British army sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), whose unit is stationed at a nearby military camp; Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), who has joined the Women’s Land Army and been assigned to work on a farm in the area; and American soldier Bob Johnson (John Sweet), en route from Salisbury to Canterbury to see the cathedral. Salisbury is the next stop: Bob gets off at Chillingbourne in error and into a spat with the stationmaster, Thomas Duckett (Charles Hawtrey, pretty good), who instantly educates the trio in some key rules of the locality. As decreed by Mr Colpeper – ‘local magistrate, Justice of the Peace’ – all new arrivals in Chillingbourne must report to the ‘town’ hall and ‘no young lady must go alone at night’. Bob and Peter therefore escort Alison to their common destination. On the way, she’s assailed by a figure who pours glue on her hair before running off into the dark. Alison and her companions soon discover this is the latest in a series of attacks by a neighbourhood pest known as ‘the Glue Man’.
Within these first few minutes, Powell and Pressburger confirm, introduce and combine key themes of A Canterbury Tale. We’re reminded that there’s a war on from the words spoken and the darkness in which they’re spoken: Thomas Duckett isn’t alone in telling off Bob Johnson for using a powerful flashlight. Bob grumbles about poky English eccentricity, the stationmaster about uppity Americans – humorously bad-tempered exchanges that prepare the ground for the film to illustrate the two countries’ partnership. It’s made clear that Thomas Colpeper JP is an important figure in the community. The Glue Man, as usual under cover of darkness, has made his entrance: finding out who he is, will be what draws Alison, Bob and Peter together over the weekend ahead.
The glue attacks on young women in the area have been happening once every few days in recent months. Alison, annoyed rather than upset by the assault (it takes a lot of hot water to remove all the sticky stuff from her hair), visits several of the earlier victims. Although amateur detective work drives the story, the film is hardly a whodunit: from a very early stage, there’s really only one Glue Man candidate. Within twenty-four hours, Alison and Bob have decided that Colpeper is the culprit; Peter obtains the clinching evidence next day. More intriguing than the plot events are the manner and context of the investigation. The three sleuths are not just grown-ups but serving army members yet there’s something Secret Seven-ish about the way they go about their business – an impression reinforced by Bob’s enlisting the help of a group of local kids. These little boys are introduced playing at soldiers, which Powell and Pressburger present as both heartening and endearing (the youngest ‘soldier’ starts wailing when the others leave him behind). At this distance in time, the precocious war games hardly raise the spirits but it must have been different in 1944. The boys’ pretend militia, as an illustration of what the Archers see as delightfully English, epitomises the film’s linked central strands. A Canterbury Tale is a morale booster and a paean to Powell’s native land (and county: he was born and went to school in Kent) and Pressburger’s adopted home (he came to England in 1935, having fled Nazi Germany two years previously).
For those watching with 20/20s vision, some ‘patriotic’ details are more palatable than others. The beauty of the landscapes is unarguable; the social distinctions on display, presumably designed to confirm English life as a rich tapestry, are less enjoyable. There’s a derided village idiot (Esmond Knight, who has a third role as a Cockney soldier). There’s a ‘comical’ maid (furiously overplayed by Esma Cannon, another Carry On regular post-war) in the inn where Bob Johnson stays. All those who don’t speak RP English (except for Bob) are simple souls. That’s only to be expected, of course, in British cinema of this vintage – just as it’s necessary for Alison Smith, though a mere shop girl in London before the war, to be fratefully well spoken because she’s one of the main parts. But this is harder to take when class structures come across, in this film, as an integral part of what we’re fighting to preserve. More likeable is the Anglo-American kinship hinted at through the shared traditions of Chillingbourne’s artisans and (relatively classless) Bob Johnson’s family. A conversation between Bob and wheelwright Jim Horton (Edward Rigby) reveals common ground in woodworking – Bob’s grandfather had the first lumber mill in Johnson County, Oregon – and concludes in Jim’s dinner (aka lunch) invitation to Bob.
Within this scheme Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman) is an entirely and a powerfully discordant element. In Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942), another fascinating British film of the war years, the villagers of Bramley End unite to resist and put an end to German occupation of the village, despite the fifth columnist in their midst, who turns out to be the local squire. The Glue Man may be a comparatively minor malefactor but the concealed identity of Colpeper, gentleman farmer and Chillingbourne head honcho, might seem to place him in the same, socially subversive tradition. He’s a much more complex figure than Cavalcanti’s squire, though. Colpeper is a bachelor, who lives with his elderly mother (Margaret Scudamore, in real life the mother of Michael Redgrave). His puritan misogyny is evident from an early stage. Alison has to come to work on his farm; he tells her it’s an unsuitable job for a woman. He also warns her of ‘a camp near this village full of soldiers’; when she replies that she’s not interested in soldiers, he suggests, ‘Perhaps they’re interested in you’. On the Saturday evening, Colpeper is disturbed again to see Alison with Bob and Peter – and the only woman present – at his lecture on local history, about which he’s passionate.
On the Monday morning, in the course of the short train journey to Canterbury where he’s due to sit on the magistrates’ bench, Colpeper confronts his three accusers – and fully explains his extraordinary reasons for harassing young women in the locality. ‘You’re not going to defend pouring glue on people?’ asks Alison. Colpeper replies:
‘Certainly not. But I’m going to defend pouring knowledge into people’s heads, by force if necessary. … Knowledge of our country and love of its beauty. … I’ve tried it before this war. Why should it be any better after it? I’ve written articles that didn’t get further than the county papers. I rented a hall in London to speak from … but nobody came to listen. … Then the war came and, just as I was thinking … that all the things I’d been preaching about would have to wait until peacetime, a miracle happened … the army decided to build a camp just outside our village. Young men flowed in from every part of the country. I felt as a missionary must feel when one day he finds there’s no need to travel into the jungle to find converts, because the savages are coming to him. … I planned a series of lectures – no one came. … I went to see [the soldiers’] CO – he sympathised. He said when the men had finished their work they had dates with the girls in the village …. went to the movies to see glamour girls on the screen.’
He adds, half-heartedly, that ‘Nobody wanted to stop the soldiers having a good time …’ The solution was therefore – as Peter Gibbs puts it and Colpeper agrees – to stop the girls from having a good time instead.
Colpeper’s rationale is as deluded as it’s bizarre. He doesn’t stop the soldiers from having a good time if they can still see ‘glamour girls’ at the movies, albeit without female company beside them. He isn’t nurturing appreciation of English countryside history and traditions in his quasi-captive audience, as the soldiers’ light-hearted reactions to his lecture make clear. Colpeper evidently wasn’t interested in controlling the local womenfolk by having them spend evenings in the lecture hall – a pearls-before-swine option, in his view: these talks are for men only. He combines homosocial zeal with a fetishistic means of keeping women inside their own homes. The scale of his wrongdoing makes him only a very distant relation of the protagonist of Peeping Tom (1960); A Canterbury Tale‘s anti-hero does, even so, trigger occasional reminders of that later Michael Powell film.
Yet Colpeper is also Powell and Pressburger’s mouthpiece for the glories of garden-of-England landscape and culture. We listen to him in that role, our interest not at all compromised by awareness of his darker side. At the lecture, Colpeper tells the soldiers:
‘There are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors. Follow the old road and, as you walk, think of them and of the old England. They climbed Chillingbourne Hill, just as you did … when you see the bluebells in the spring, and the wild thyme, and the broom, and the heather, you’re only seeing what they’re seeing … you’re so close to those other people that you can hear the thrumming of the hooves of their horses, and the sounds of the wheels on the road, and their laughter and talk, and the music of the instruments they carried …’
As he speaks these words the camera moves from Colpeper’s face to the rapt face of Alison in the audience, and Allan Gray’s music swells mysteriously. Although we already know that the area carries potent personal memories for Alison, it’s very striking that the following day – as she walks on Chillingbourne Hill and just before she comes upon Colpeper there – Alison seems to experience exactly what he mentioned in his talk. What’s more, Colpeper turns out to be not quite the mother-fixated, borderline pervert that his domestic circumstances and anti-social antics might suggest. His hillside conversation with Alison (a remarkable piece of writing) causes her to change her mind about a man she disliked at first sight and implies that he’s attracted to her. Eric Portman was the highest-profile actor in the cast. That’s obviously why, in the opening credits, his name appears above the film’s title and the names of the other main players but the order of priority is more comprehensively apt. Thomas Colpeper is one of Portman’s finest creations – sinister but, through the impacted melancholy he conveys, almost tragic. Portman’s portrait not only eclipses the pilgrims of the story, to varying degrees and for different reasons; it also, as a result, throws the whole film somewhat out of kilter.
Each of the three pilgrims is, to put it simply, unfulfilled. In civilian life, Peter was a cinema organist although he’d wanted to be a church organist. For weeks now, Bob’s American girlfriend hasn’t been returning his letters. Alison was engaged to be married; her fiancé, a RAF pilot in the war, went missing in action. Sheila Sim, in her early twenties at the time, is very appealing in what would prove to be, despite her youth, her most famous role. (She’s perhaps best known otherwise for a stage appearance, as a member of The Mousetrap’s original cast, alongside her husband of sixty-nine years, Richard Attenborough: both feature, in the persons of Pearl Chanda and Harris Dickinson, in Tom George’s iffy comedy-whodunit See How They Run (2022).) One of the most effective things about Sim in A Canterbury Tale is that she’s very pretty yet ordinary. She’s able, too, to make her character inquiring and strong willed but also innocent – a crucially important quality in that moment on the hillside when Alison imagines that she hears medieval music. Sheila Sim brings this off very successfully. Neither of the male pilgrims works as well. Dennis Price is easily proficient but his role is underwritten (we don’t get much sense of what Peter Gibbs really thinks about the line of work he’s ended up in). John Sweet as Bob Johnson is the opposite problem. Sweet was a sergeant in the American army, based in Britain, when he was chosen to play Bob. He can act – he’s at his best with Chillingbourne’s boy soldiers – and he’s likeable enough but very limited. For someone lacking in vocal range and variety, he has an awful lot of lines to deliver.
Each member of the trio arrives in Canterbury with a clear mission. The two men head to the cathedral: Bob as a sightseer, before he meets up with his US Army pal, Mike Roczinsky; Peter to attend a farewell service for his unit before they leave for action overseas – Peter also means to call in at the police station en route to report Colpeper. Alison, who supposedly has an appointment with the agricultural committee that assigned her to Colpeper’s farm, goes instead to a garage in Rose Lane, where the caravan in which she and her fiancé spent their holiday in the area some years ago is kept, literally under wraps. There are unexpected developments for all three of them. The senior police officer Peter wanted to see is officiating at the cathedral service so unavailable to meet him. At the cathedral, Peter gets into conversation with the organist (Eliot Makeham), who invites him to have a go playing the great organ. In a teashop, Mike (Harvey Golden) hands over to Bob a pack of letters from the girl he thought he’d lost but who has joined the Women’s Army Corps and is writing from Australia. Alison discovers that her fiancé’s father wanted urgently to contact his prospective daughter-in-law but didn’t have her address: her intended is alive and well in Gibraltar.
In his autobiography, Michael Powell had harsh words and high praise for A Canterbury Tale. While acknowledging Emeric Pressburger’s ‘valiant attempts to turn it into a detective thriller’, Powell dismissed the story as ‘a frail and unconvincing structure’. He went on to laud the film’s last half hour: ‘All the story and characters are rounded out in a masterly manner’. The extended Canterbury episode certainly does feature some real highlights. Alison struggles to find the garage because so many buildings in the area have been destroyed by German bombs: there are graphic images of the ruins as the DP Erwin Hillier follows Alison’s progress through the streets. Although there are exterior shots of Canterbury Cathedral, it was not, in 1943, available for a film shoot inside: production designer Alfred Junge’s recreation of the cathedral interiors, at Denham Studios, is breathtakingly ingenious. There’s no doubting the impact of the music when Peter Gibbs starts to play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and, in the film’s closing sequence, the choir and congregation sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. Emeric Pressburger was Jewish and Powell not (as far as I know) a practising Christian but the Church of England – as a body of members and a centre of national cultural tradition – is, in A Canterbury Tale, another vital part of what Britain is striving to preserve in fighting the war. But characters ‘rounded out in a masterly manner’? Peter is such a slender character that you feel he’s only included as a pilgrim because he can deliver a big emotional climax by playing the Bach. The bestowal of ‘blessings’ on Bob and Alison may have been meant to encourage wartime audiences to stay hopeful in adversity. In the film’s finale, however, it feels less a masterly rounding out than a mechanical working out.
Pressburger’s script (assuming it was chiefly his work, as Powell suggests) contains plenty of incisive dialogue. This comes through in some short near-monologues – from Alison’s fellow land girls (Freda Jackson and Betty Jardine), for example – as well as in longer exchanges between the principals. A Canterbury Tale is absorbing from start to finish and increasingly compelling – but chiefly because it’s such a peculiar concoction. At the Rose Lane garage, Alison’s sad review of the caravan’s moth-eaten décor is interrupted by the arrival of Thomas Colpeper, who seems to be on the point of proposing to her. He reminds her that ‘life is full of disappointments’, just before experiencing another one of his own, as Alison absorbs the good news that her fiancé isn’t dead after all. Colpeper discreetly disappears but he’s back for the church service. This man, who professes belief in miracles, is a thwarted, disquieting counterpoint to the miraculous turnabouts for Alison, Bob and Peter. Colpeper, whose only consolation is that Peter doesn’t, in the event, report his Glue Man activities to the police, is reduced in Canterbury Cathedral to one of the crowd. Even on the sidelines, Eric Portman makes him impossible to ignore.
11 November 2023