glennibbitson The world is divided into those who,when someone mentions 'the Archers', think of BBC Radio Four's interminable 'everyday story of inbred folk', and those others who bring to mind the production company which propelled their cinematic genius of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to the screen. My favourite P&P film is almost invariably the latest one I have revisited, though 'A Canterbury Tale' never seems far from the top of the list.Why? One example of its visual power. Put a group of cineastes in a room and sooner rather than later, they will refer to one of the most iconic transformation shots in cinema: Stanley Kubrick's use of a shard of bone to journey forward from a pre-history of violent savagery to a space shuttle in mid- commute in 2001. It is possibly Kubrick's most memorable piece of editing. Yet in 'A Canterbury Tale', Powell presents a smoother, and far more poetic transformation shot. It catapults us from Chaucer's Fourteenth Century pilgrims forward to 1940's wartime England, by transforming a hunting kestrel into a stooping Supermarine Spitfire. The watching falconer becomes an army sentry. The 'Kubrickisti' at this point look down at their shoes and shuffle self-consciously, realising their demigod has been caught with his fingers in the splicing machine. But there is so much more to A Canterbury Tale. This is perhaps the most genre defying piece of cinematic poetry ever made with the commercial cinema in mind. In written description it seems to be a mass of contradiction. It's plot driver is a petty criminal, but this is not a manhunt. It is very much a war film played out in a landscape populated with troops, but no shots are fired. The only violent battle scene takes place between pre-teen children. It is based on a classic of world literature, but only loosely. There is not so much as a kiss, but an atmosphere of febrile sexuality prevails every frame. It identifies human decency derived from the use of a shared language, the use of which is frequently divergent in meaning. It is a timeless story story set in a specific location at a particular point in time. Four people and landscape, each bearing the indelible marks of their pasts.The film is, like life itself, fairly plotless; a capture of an episode in the lives of four people who had lives before this point and will continue them after we have left them. The plot device is mundanity itself. Someone is going around pouring glue into the hair of young girls, under the cover of darkness. The 'Glue Man's' crime is of a low priority and somehow very English in its eccentricity; in no way comparable with the crimes against humanity being perpetrated across the Channel. The film will not develop into a manhunt feature; the culprit is revealed to the audience within the first twenty minutes or so. Not so much a 'Whodunnit' as a 'Whydunnit'. It is motivation for the glue assaults which is important. Here, subtext is everything. The script was a response to the contemporary situation in wartime England. With the entry of the United States into the war, plans to liberate Europe depended on the use of England as a physical springboard. In preparation for a ground offensive, a massive influx of US armed forces personnel were by 1943, "over-paid, over-sexed and over here". Figures in authority at any time are suspicious of those younger and more virile than themselves and attribute moral irresponsibility to their condition. Wartime England, its population boosted by American servicemen had more hormonal youth than could be easily controlled from above. Worse, this young immigrant service force were affluent. They brought with them all things modern - dance music, consumer treats and perhaps also a more 'sophisticated' or permissive philosophy, with which to impress a young indigenous female population awakened to its own mortality by the wartime casualties around them. Any subsequent increase in the rate of pregnancies out of wedlock would create frictions between both the generations and the Old and New World allies and might sap the joint war effort. The film presents two approaches to this problem. 'The Glue Man' proposes to counter this threat to the social fabric through the technique of aversion therapy. Any girl 'stepping out' with servicemen on a date is a target for a glue-pouring attack. His hope is to turn young minds away from carnal thoughts towards the more intellectually rewarding pursuit of historical study. The enthusiastic consumer of Ryman adhesive supplies happens to be a Justice of the Peace and a pillar of the local community. P&P's solution is to trust in common decency: social intercourse and mutual accommodation built on the foundation of a common language. As words on paper, this reads like an Anglo-American bridge-building propaganda exercise. What they present is actually a very acute series of social details which provide points of connection. A central scene here is when two characters from different nations, generations and occupations discover that they fall back on a shared pool of knowledge of wood types and woodworking techniques. Such connections are counter-intuitively reinforced by the divergences the nations have occasionally made from the common pathway. The American officer discovers that the English speaking peoples have different words for currency and grocery stores. Different measurements for town and river size. Radically different police methods and telephone systems. Military stripes which follow opposite directions of travel symbolise the deviations from the common cause -but also represent the small scale of these differences within the broader scheme. By the end of the film, even 50% of the film's American contingent have succumbed to the pleasure of tea-drinking!John Sweet's performance is quite revelatory. Portman, Price and Sim were always going to be reliable and entertaining fellow travellers, but how adventurous the decision to cast a non-actor in the central male role. Powell had initially hoped to cast Burgess Meredith, already an actor of note. Though a fine actor, he would have impregnated the role with a degree of off-screen personality and worldly wisdom. Thanks to US Army bureaucracy, Powell instead had to use an amateur he had seen in a Red Cross production and the result produces an anchor of realism for a soaring, almost mystical portrayal of a nation at the crossroads of history. In his acting inexperience, Sweet imbues Sgt. Bob Johnson from Oregon with his own gaucheness and naivety, being himself a young man adrift in surroundings most unlike his native Minnesota. He knows nobody, he struggles with everyday Englishness - the telephone system and the Inn's breakfast protocol. Frustration gradually develops into enchantment with this alien culture with roots which travel deeper back through time well beyond Columbus' 'discovery' of the New World. Not least because he makes an effort with the local people; Wheelwrights, children and his fellow 'pilgrims'. He called upon his own experience to refine his performance. "a scene sitting in a farm cart lamenting the lack of letters from my girl friend back home. Now it just so happens that I myself was in a no-mail-from-my-wife slump and when I talked about my loneliness it came out on the film quite real and life like. Where, said director, did you find this sudden mastery .... despite the edge of sarcasm, I needed and welcomed the compliment."His wholesome good nature was not simply screen persona. He received $2,000 from the film company. US Army ruled that any outside pay must be given to a charity. He elected to donate the full sum to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Coming from a native of Minnesota and enlisted in an army which had imposed a rigid colour bar within its own institutions, this was a profound gesture and fully vindicated Powell's reading of human nature. At an upstate New York film festival, someone asked this humble man about the effect of the film on his career - was there a fan club? He said he received a total of 3 fan letters from 3 lonesome British servicewomen. In return for his invaluable contribution to the film, the production and the corner of England which provided its location shoot rewarded 'pilgrim' Sweet his own blessing; "The few months I spent making the film were the most profound and influential of my life".My personal favourite moment? Everything here is a pleasure, but the sequence which moves me closer to tears with every viewing is when Alison returns to the caravan which she shared with her fiance on a prewar archeological excavation. he is now lost in action. This conduit for their shared past is decaying before her eyes. Her revulsion at the flight of the clothes moths emerging from his coat and into the light, is moving beyond words. And then.... her blessing is awarded and in an unexpected form...watch and be delighted. Always give a film a viewing before referring to an online movie critique -this one included!. Rotten Tomatoes presents some interesting and widely divergent views, which might, on balance, just usher a potential viewer away from this gem and toward more easily digestible commercial fare. I believe ACT is worth two hours of anybody's time.

James Hitchcock Michael Powell was born in Canterbury, and "A Canterbury Tale" can be seen as his love-poem to his native city. The film opens with a quotation from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and a shot of his pilgrims making their way to Canterbury, and the action is set either in the city itself or in the nearby fictitious small town of Chillingbourne (an amalgam of the villages of Chilham, Fordwich, and Wickhambreaux, with the name perhaps owing something to "Sittingbourne"). His three main characters- British Army Sergeant Peter Gibbs, U.S. Army Sergeant Bob Johnson and Alison Smith, a "Land Girl" - arrive by train in Chillingbourne one summer evening and are explicitly compared to modern-day pilgrims. Part of the story concerns the "blessings" they receive after they visit Canterbury.The main problem with the film is that the central story is a silly one. Peter, Bob and Alison learn that somebody in Chillingbourne is pouring glue into the hair of local girls who have been dating soldiers from a nearby camp, and decide to unmask the culprit. We do eventually learn who the "glue man" is, and what his motive is, although this might have come as a surprise to audiences in 1944, and will probably still surprise modern ones. He is motivated neither by jealousy at losing a girlfriend to a soldier (which would probably have been the most common guess in 1944) nor by some bizarre sexual fetish (which would probably be the most common guess today).Powell and Pressburger were concerned to encourage wartime Anglo-American friendship (a theme they also dealt with in a later film, "A Matter of Life and Death"), but the character of Bob does not seem particularly calculated to endear the British public to their transatlantic guests. He is the sort of Yank who greets every minor difference between the British and American ways of life (driving on the left, unarmed policemen, etc.) not only with bafflement but also with a barely-concealed belief that the American way of doing things must inevitably be superior. At times, in fact, The Archers actually seem to be exaggerating Anglo-American differences in order to make a point. Contrary to what we are led to believe here, quite a lot of Americans do indeed drink tea, and no American would express surprise at a settlement as small as Chillingbourne being called a town. (In many parts of the States the word "village" is rarely used and the word "town" is used to describe settlements which in Britain would be considered villages).The character of Bob is played by Sergeant John Sweet, a real-life American GI. He never appeared in another film after this one (although he lived to be 95), and I cannot say that the decision to use an amateur actor really paid off; perhaps Powell and Pressburger had difficulty finding a professional American actor in the England of 1944. When the film was released in America after the war, the Canadian actor Raymond Massey acted as narrator- Esmond Knight narrated the British version- and extra scenes were added with Kim Hunter as Johnson's girlfriend. (Massey and Hunter were chosen because they were due to star in "A Matter of Life and Death").What saves the film from a lower mark is the quality of the cinematography. Powell achieves some striking black and white photography of the city of Canterbury and of the surrounding countryside. An important scene takes place in Canterbury Cathedral, but because of wartime conditions the Cathedral itself was not available for filming; this scene was shot on a set recreated in the studio. Two years before the film was made, the city had been devastated by enemy bombing during the so-called Baedeker raids; according to Nazi propaganda Canterbury had been singled out because the city's Archbishop, William Temple, was an advocate of the bombing of German cities. Powell and Pressburger do not shy away from depicting the devastation caused by the bombing; indeed, they make it a theme of their film.The rural parts of the film are perhaps even more important than the urban ones. The theme is essentially what might be called neo-romantic nationalism, a sense that in the English landscape the past always haunts the present. At the time the film probably seemed to express a timeless vision of an unchanging rural England; Bob, a carpenter in civilian life, finds that he can talk to the local wheelwright without risk of cultural misunderstandings because both Britain and America hold to traditional methods of woodworking. Yet this was an England which already stood on the verge of change. In the forties many farms still relied upon horse-and-cart methods of agriculture, and the local wheelwright would have been a key figure in any village. The mechanisation of agriculture, however, had begun in the twenties and thirties, and even from the vantage-point of 1944 it was probably already predictable that the old methods would not last for very much longer. As things turned out, the horse-and-cart days were largely gone by the sixties."A Canterbury Tale", therefore, attempts to deal with some quite ambitious themes. It is a pity that a better storyline could not have been found to embody them. 6/10 A goof. The character Thomas Colpeper, who is supposed to be very knowledgeable about the local area, mentions "heather" among the flowers which can be found on the Downs near Chillingbourne. A genuinely knowledgeable local man would have realised that heather needs sandy, acidic soils and therefore will not grow on the chalky, alkaline soils of the North Downs.

Scott44 ***Good review from drednm ("Dennis Price in His First Starring Role", drednm from United States, 10 June 2013). Also, jeremy corbett's review ("'What I wouldn't give to grow old in a place like this'", jeremy corbett UK, 10 April 2006) has spoilers, but is also worthwhile.***"A Canterbury Tale (1944, Michael Powell​ and Emeric Pressburger​) is a traditional, quintessentially English film that works on many levels. While gentle in its approach, it is transcendent, producing a feeling of ecstasy at the conclusion. Despite serving as a propaganda statement for war-weary Britons, "Canterbury Tale" is a timeless source of inspiration.Set on the eve of D-Day, a spirited "Land Girl" named Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), an American GI named Bob Johnson (real-life Yankee GI John Sweet) and British soldier Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) are train passengers who wind up stranded at night in a small Kent town on the road to fabled Canterbury, UK​. As the three walk to the village in the dark, Alison is attacked by a uniformed figure that the townsfolk have named "The Glue Man." During the brief encounter, the Glue Man applies the irritating sticky stuff to Alison's hair, just as he has done to nearly a dozen other young women. After trying unsuccessfully to remove the irksome contamination, fiery Alison first convinces Bob, and later Peter, to help her expose the identity of the culprit to the village. The investigation invariably leads to Thomas Colpeper, Jr. (Eric Portman), who the three met the night of the incident. He is a bachelor, farmer, magistrate, historian, lecturer and a pillar of the community.Most of the situations that follow concern ordinary life in a small English town. The central mystery is just a device that allows Powell and Pressburger to include a slew of memorable British characters, all of which are given ample opportunity to breathe. At the same time, scenes unfold briskly, with rapid-fire dialog throughout. It is hard to imagine any improvement in the story telling; and each scene is magnificent to look at.When sharing a cart on the road to Canterbury, former London shop girl Alison and slow-talking, small town-reared Bob appear to be heading for a romance. Temptation rises when we learn that Bob's girl back in the States hasn't written him in nearly two months. Also, Alison's boyfriend is MIA and is regarded as a war casualty. However, the work obligations of both force them to part ways. Later, Alison and Peter are reunited on a country road when she and her horse-drawn cart are surrounded by tanks that Peter and his company are training with. Alison is furious at the display of force being directed against her (and her hard-working equine). Her frustration mirrors the theme expressed by the narrator in the film's beginning; i.e., the British countryside which remained largely unchanged since the days of Geoffrey Chaucer​ is suddenly being overridden by soldiers and their war machines. While outwardly patriotic, "Canterbury Tale" contains anti-war sentiments, particularly when we see the tanks callously run over non-combatant foliage.When the four pilgrims finally reach Canterbury, cinematic magic occurs. Adhering to legend, the famous cathedral is where the four can expect to "receive blessings or do penance." Without revealing too much, penance is tasked to the man who opens his heart only to have it broken.With one exception, the entire cast is mesmerizing. This includes the children who play at war. Sheila Sim, Dennis Price and Eric Portman all possess very sonorous voices that are exquisite to listen to. The narrator, Esmond Knight, has two other roles: He is the soldier during the lecture who befriends Bob; and also the stuttering, drunken town fool. The only actor who is a little unconvincing is US Army Sergeant John Sweet, who was not an actor (and never appears again in a film). Sweet does tend to annoy at times with his overly nasal speaking qualities and callow manner. Considering how sexually fearless Sheila Sim's Alison seems to be, Sweet seems to be out of his league when paired with her in the same scene.Powell and Pressburger serve up one exquisite Black and White image after another. There are plenty of visual gags; but you need to detect them quickly before the next image arrives. Fans of endearing British cinema and/or those who draw inspiration from ancient traditions should not miss this unusual film that restores faith. Many of us certainly could use a reversal of fortune, from whatever source.

intelearts Full of character, characters, and superb photography this ranks as one of the Archers best.Made in 1944 A Canterbury Tale is an extraordinary film for wartime. Their triumph is that in1944 they produced a film that is about calm assurance in what was a time of great concern. It is a film that says on the eve of D-Day that life carries on and that decency and good values are the greatest comfort of all. A message worth broadcasting in 1944: the things that make us human (and British) do not change.Not snobbery or class, but rather something almost ethereal, poetic, a beauty in good nature.This is a gentle, even sentimental, film that affects the viewer because it talks of decency and good manners, of simplicity and good nature.Seemingly plot less until the last 15 minutes, excepting the MacGuffin of a man who glues girls' hair, and so inspires the three strangers to investigate, the last 15 minutes tie all the pieces up miraculously.Worth watching as a time capsule - it is hugely evocative.Essential viewing for anyone serious about film - outstanding.