RETROSPECTIVE FILM REVIEW

A Canterbury Tale (1944) • 80 Years Later — supernatural inklings in Powell and Pressburger’s tale of wartime rural England

In an English village where the past seems still alive, three strangers try to solve a peculiar mystery.

An ancient window looks out onto a neighbouring medieval house; framed in the window is a British soldier wearing the uniform of the mid-20th century. A dusty caravan sits in a nondescript modern garage; through the garage window can be glimpsed the vast stone mass of Canterbury Cathedral. The past and the present are indissolubly linked in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, and there is a spiritual context to even the most mundane things.

These and other striking images allow the film to achieve a kind of transcendence and bring some unity to it, despite Powell and Pressburger’s tendency to include scenes and characters purely for their own sake, even when they contribute little to the overall narrative impetus. (In practice, Pressburger wrote the pair’s films and Powell directed…