I wonder if Philip Larkin saw  A Canterbury Tale as a youth. He would have been 22 when the film came out. In one of his most famous poems, “The Whitsun Weddings,” he describes the English countryside, as seen from a train, as “postal districts packed like squares of wheat.” And there, in the film’s first few minutes is a landscape shot of Kent, near Canterbury, its fields,  mutatis mutandis,  as Larkin describes them. The film’s opening narration is in the form of rhymed couplets sounding not unlike Larkin, and is read by Esmond Knight in a tone of exaltation that Larkin himself recommended for the reading “The Whitsun Weddings.”

A Canterbury Tale (1944) also evinces some of the bedrock English characteristics which Larkin’s poetry is famous for celebrating. Pluck, generosity, a sense of “getting on with it” in the face of difficulties, an openess to strangers, and a silently held melancholy about one’s state in life. Larkin, on the other hand, could drepress the hell out of you with his meditations on a Godless death.  A Canterbury Tale‘s ostensible project is to “support the war effort” and foster better British – American relations as it tells a modern Canterbury tale in which three travelers at the height of hte war come together in the village of Chillingbourne to solve a puzzle.

The travelers are Alison Smith (Sheila Sim, in a role originally slated to Deborah Kerr), a “widow” who has gone to country to become a Land Girl, Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price, of  Kind Hearts and Coronets), a sergeant in the British army based not far from Chillingbourne, where they are practicing maneuvers for D-Day, and sergeant Bob Johnson (John Sweet, an amateur whom Powell spotted in a production of  Our Town, and who returned to teaching after the war), an American on his way to Canterbury to meet his buddy and see the church. Their first night in Chillingbourne results in Allison being doused by the nefarious Glue Man, who targets women out in the street at night with or near soldiers. The next day the three resolve to solve the crime which the local constabulary seems hesitant or unable to solve.

Each of the three travelers has a flaw or secret wish. Allison believes that she is a widow, that her husband, a pilot, was shot down by the Germans. Their “caravan,” or camper, is stored in Canterbury, and part of her reason for volunteering as a Land Girl was to seek out the camper for sentimental reasons. Johnson, from Johnson County, Oregon, is distraught because his girl has stopped writing to him. Gibbs, who tickles the ivories in a movie theater, always wanted to be a church organist.

It’s difficult to describe the unsettling nature of this film, both cozy and tense at the same time. From its famous cut between a medieval hawk returning to its master to a contemporary British fighter plane in the same sky, indeed the same spot, a cut so reminiscent, as many others have pointed out, of Kubrick’s similar trick in  2001, to the gentle almost non-verbal resolution to the three main characters woes, it is a magical film. The magician at the center of this magic is Thomas Colpeper, JP (Eric Portman, in a role that Roger Livesey turned down). A judge, a gentleman farmer, an archeologist of the local landscape, he has a mystical relationship with the land, and seems to touch people’s lives like a Jesus of Canterbury, drawing people out and turning their instinctive hate into respect. He also almost always appears suddenly, out of no where. Yet he starts out seeming like a homosexual woman-hater who may well be the notorious Glue Man.

The Glue Man plot engine is the most perplexing part of the movie, in that it’s such an odd crime. But it was worse originally, with the Glue Man something like a Canterbury Slasher. It is also very “English,” or at least English movie, for the three new fast friends to drop everything and try to solve the mystery.

 

 

Not all the magic resides within Colpeper. There is a marvelous sequence where Allison and Bob run into each other at the wheelwright’s shop. Since Bob is from Oregon, famous for its forestry, he soon gets on well with the wheelwright, talking wood density and harvesting timing. The wheelwright invites Bob back for lunch and he takes him up on it, but we never see the actual meal, though it is referred to later in dialogue. It’s very touching and delicate the way Powell takes the viewer through different attitudes to arrive at a state of mutual respect. The only analog I can think of in contemporary films is certain scenes in David Lynch’s  The Straight Story, which captures a similar egalitarianism. Another deeply moving moment is when Allison, in close up, hears the “sounds” of medieval Canterbury, and looks like Ingrid Bergman as her hair whips around her. One difference, however, is that there is a pronounced sexual tension throughout the movie, from the unexpressed, or even unacknowledged interest some of the characters have for each other, and the integration of people with “alternative” sexualities into the war effort.

I was so enthralled with the magic of A Canterbury Tale that I watched it three times, putting me even further behind in my DVD reviewing. The Criterion Collection’s two-disc offering, disc No. 341,  gives us a transfer of the 1977 125 minute restoration of the black and white film in a full frame windowboxed transfer.

 

 

Extras on Disc One include an audio commentary by Ian Christie, who is a longtime Powell scholar and who contributed an essay on  Canterbury Tale to the excellent anthology  The Cinema of Michael Powell, edited by Christie and Andrew Moor and published by the BFI. Also on disc one is a small compilation of the American segments made for the shorter US release, featuring Kim Hunter as Mrs. Bob Johnson.

 

Disc two has a modest array of very informative supplements. There is a new video interview with Sim (Mrs. Richard Attenborough) who provides some affectionate anecdotes. This is followed by “John Sweet: A Pilgrim’s Journey,” made when Sweet returned to Canterbury in 2000 for a special event. It is interesting to hear his comments on “stardom.” “A Canterbury Trail” is a video record of a walking tour of the film’s sets conducted occasionally by historian Paul Tritton and Powell and Pressburger fan Steve Crook. Finally there  is “Listening to Britain,” a piece of installation by one Victor Burgin that blends images from this film and Humphrey Jenning’s quasi-documentary “Listen to Britain.” The installation piece is a seven minute loop, and the disc also offers Jenning’s film as a counterbalance. There’s also a 24-page  booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer info, and essays by Fraham Fuller, and Peter von Bagh, with diary entries made by Sweet at the time of filming.  A Canterbury Tale hit the street on Tuesday, July 25 retailing for $39.95.

 

Late in 2005, Criterion also released another Powell and Pressburger “tale,” their adaptation of the opera  The Tales of Hoffman. Released in 1951, is a colorful account of the Jacques Offenbach’s opera adapting three supernatural love tales by E.T.A. Hoffman. Metropolitan opera star  Robert Rounseville is Hoffman, telling the tales in a tavern while Stella (Moria Shearer) finishes up a ballet performance on stage nearby. Hoffman’s nemesis is Councilman Lindorff (Robert Helpmann), who also loves, or at least wants, Stella. It is a very visual film, but the interpretation of the music is a tad on the slow side (or at least so my opera buff experts tell me), and though the visual style has invoked references to Jean Cocteau, to me it feels Disney. Still, I’d rather have this disc than any of the hundred others that came out that day.

 

The Criterion Collection’s edition, spine No. 317, is a vivid full frame transfer marred only occasionally by some of the peculiarities of the Technicolor process. Supplements for this disc are unusual. This is the 127 minute version of the movie; supposedly there is an 138 minute original that is lost. There is an  audio commentary with both director Martin Scorsese, a Powell enthusiast,  and music historian Bruce Eder, and there is also an 18-minute interview with George A. Romero, who turns out also to be a longtime fan of the film. Also on hand is “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1956), a short musical film directed by Powell, based on the Goethe story, a gallery of production sketches by production designer Hein Heckroth, a stills galleries, and the theatrical trailer. Finally, there is a 12-page insert with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer info, and an essay by the always informative Christie.  The Tales of Hoffman retails for $39.95 and hit the street on Tuesday, November 22, 2005.