Does A Canterbury Tale end with a glimpse of a better future?

 

It's time to revisit Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's film A Canterbury Tale. Here's Xan Brooks, whose favourite film it also is, writing in the Guardian in 2011:

On beginning this blog, I was going to write that the story of A Canterbury Tale is a bit like the legend of the Arthurian knights asleep on the hillside, waiting to be called forth at the hour of greatest need. 

But that’s not quite right, because the film implicitly suggests that there is no hillside, no sleeping knights, and no magical horn to call them forth. 

The only world is the one we’re in, bashed about and bent out of shape, and the only heroes the people around us: frail and fearful, sometimes misguided, and coping as best they can. But if we can learn to trust them, and invite them to trust us back, then we may just be OK. 

More than that, we might even be blessed; rattling through the ruins to uncover miracles in derelict caravans and hear the voice of angels in the train whistle’s yelp.

I'm sure I've quoted Brooks before, but in recent days I've come across some new discussion of A Canterbury Tale.

There's a good edition of the podcast Made in England on the film, with the American writer Dan Kois as the guest. It's well worth a listen.

The host, Jack McInroy, talks enthusiastically about an article on A Canterbury Tale by Kim Newman, and I've managed to find it on The Powell & Pressburger Pages:

My choice for Powell's most audacious film - not a perfect masterpiece like several of the other [films] cited, but still a work of dazzling, bewildering genius - is A Canterbury Tale (1944), a mystical meditation on what it means to be English, set during WWII. 

Eric Portman is a local magistrate who pours glue into girls' hair during the black-outs, dissuading them from fraternising with the American troops, a barmy crusade that is first seen in horror film terms, and then transformed into an endeavour at once insane, transcendent and saintly. 

The film, in luminous black and white with shining daylight and pitch darks, is imbued with magic from its first shot: a mediaeval falconer releasing a bird, which the camera follows as it does a 2001 stunt transforming into a Spitfire before returning to the face of the man, who has become a '40's ARP warden. 

It catches perfectly the feel of its time, peeling back the layers of history like a Nigel Kneale curse to disclose something primal and awesome in the heart of Kent, even to the extent of winding up with the modern pilgrims - an amiable American soldier played by an amateur, a shopgirl turned farmhand for the duration, and a poetic tank sergeant-cum-organist played by Dennis Price - each rewarded with a peculiar kind of miracle. 

It was reviled and boycotted on its release, far more so than the controversial Colonel Blimp, accused of pretension and silliness. But it looks far better now than many an accepted classic of the British cinema, isolating in a truly English setting the deep feelings and powers missed by the tidiness of David Lean or Ealing comedies, turning hedges and streams into a landscape as mythic and cinematically vibrant as John Ford's Monument Valley, opening up a strain in our national cinema that lead to Robert Hamer, Seth Holt, John Gilling, Dennis Potter, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman. 

The sequence where the adults are drawn into a children's battle game upon a glowing stream is at once lyrical, funny, moving and subtly dark, the way Peter Pan or A Wind In The Willows were before Uncle Walt got his syrup-spoon to them. 

Like all great narrative art, it transcends genre and seems to contain all possibilities of fiction - erotic, horrific, funny, religious, wise, historical, pastoral, political, cynical, naive - and indeed,of human behaviour, being about the persistence of peace in wartime and the relevance of the distant past to a jitterbugging present. 

And like all the films listed in this section, a lot of people hate this film a lot. But I love it. I loved it when I first saw it on television in the '70's, I loved it when I interviewed Powell over the phone in 1985, I loved it the day in February 1990 I heard its director had died, and I love it on video now. 

Films aren't books; they are more than words, and this film has something it's hard to convey, dodging around the intellect it engages so easily and playing straight to the heart and guts.

Finally, a post on The Movie Screen Scene has noticed a little glimpse of a better future in the film.

A Canterbury Tale was set and made in the period before D-Day. The American amateur actor Sgt John Sweet couldn't attend the premiere in the city in May 1944 because he was on Eisenhower's staff in London and planning D-Day for real. So, as the Made in England podcast reminds us, we don't know what was to become of his character or Dennis Price's or of Sheila Sim's fiancé. 

But right at the end of the film, the closing credits play over another scene of the boys who fought a battle on the river. It may be significant that they are no longer playing war but football.