Review of ‘A Canterbury Tale’ (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1944)

‘A Canterbury Tale’ is a curious film, one which, like ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ a couple of years later, was meant to affirm the ties that bind between Britain and America during the Second World War. It has a strong spiritual and mystical underpinning, in this tale of US servicemen who come to Canterbury and are changed by the rural and Cathedral English setting, just as the local population are in turn affected by their encounter with their allies in this new environment.

But this film is also quite opaque and difficult to discern in its sensibility, not really clear about what it is trying to convey, with only a tangential relationship to Chaucer’s original tale. Set for the first two thirds in the fictional village of Chillingbourne (presumably a cross between Chilham and Sittingbourne), the film veers into detective territory with the question of who might be responsible for glueing the hair of women who walk through the village, and even when the culprit is unveiled as a local magistrate who wants to stop women from distracting the men stationed in the region, the pilgrims have moved on by this point, both literally and figuratively.

The film is an ode to a way of life that has been increasingly relegated to the margins, a pre-industrial way of life where communities were more familiar and where, Powell and Pressburger posit, sacred ties between nature and family would bound. A land girl, a British sergeant and an American sergeant are the cornerstone of this reimagining of Chaucer’s pilgrimage tale, where social order and continuity between the generations is sacrosanct, and the past is seen as guiding, informing, even transforming the present, a catalyst even for social cohesion and meaning.

‘A Canterbury Tale’ features a cast of unknowns, although the waspish station master at the fictional station of Chillingbourne (actually filmed at Selling station) is Charles Hawtrey, who went on to become a staple of the ‘Carry On’ movies. This film may well also have been the inspiration for the start of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ with here a hooden falcon on the wrist of a medieval Canterbury pilgrim jumping forward several centuries so that it becomes a Spitfire.