msicism
patreon
A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1944)
🕑 Added 2021-06-28 22:26:15 +0000 UTC
A "minor film" in all senses of the word, A Canterbury Tale is also a stark distillation of the humanist wisdom that exemplified the Archers' approach to a complex world. This is a film whose plot is so flimsy as to practically signpost to the viewer that narrative is not really a concern. Instead, A Canterbury Tale is besotted with local peculiarities, glancing portraiture, and the easy camaraderie that can form among strangers during wartime. The film is too scattershot to have any single theme, but if one were hard-pressed to discern one, it would probably be that many of the smaller concerns that draw our focus in daily life are thrown into relief in the context of global warfare.
In a sense, this could even be the case for conventional storytelling, with its chains of causal events leading us inexorably to some preordained resolution. In 1944, no one could know for sure how World War II would end. So instead of a plot driven by causality, Powell and Pressburger deliver a wandering film, one that loosely borrows Chaucer's concept of fellow travelers making each other's acquaintance while on route to some other place. In A Canterbury Tale, three "pilgrims" are waylaid in the fictional village of Chillingbourne, Kent.
Inasmuch as a plot exists, A Canterbury Tale is about movement vs. stasis. Chillingbourne is considered a non-place, a way station in the course of more expansive lives. Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) of the British Army is in town because he has been stationed at a nearby base. U.S. Army Sergeant Bob Johnson (John Sweet) was headed to Canterbury and got off his train a stop too early. And Allison Smith (Sheila Sim) is the only one of the three actually bound for Chillingbourne, set to take up a job on a farm. But she is originally from London and is trying to put her life back together after losing her fiance in the war.
All three individuals end up in Canterbury eventually, but this is hardly the point. Upon exiting the late train in Chillingbourne, an unseen criminal known as "Glue Man" accosts Allison, pouring glue in her hair. When the three get into town and learn that Allison is but the 11th victim of Glue Man, she, Bob, and Peter resolve to hunt him down and bring him to justice. However, every encounter with a possible witness serves as a digression, an instance for the film to linger lovingly over these everyday townsfolk. And when the mystery is solved, in a distinctly proto-"Scooby Doo" manner, it is utterly incidental. Nothing comes of it.
[SPOILERS AHOY]
The Glue Man turns out to be Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), a local magistrate who works between Chillingbourne and Canterbury. He is a sort of gentleman scholar, dedicated to the study of the cultural and natural history of Chillingbourne. He frequently delivers open lectures about the topic, and the influx of servicemen has led to a wider audience for his civic pride pecha kuchas. As it turns out, he dumps glue in young women's hair to prevent them from going on dates with the servicemen. When Colpeper admits his actions to Allison, he explains that this was his way of protecting the virtue of the local girls, but also of forcing otherwise unoccupied men to attend his lectures.
This whole plot is preposterous, of course. (Allison sensibly asks Colpeper, "why didn't you just invite the women to your lectures?") But inasmuch as Colpeper provides the thin outline of a detective mystery, he is also fighting quite fanatically against the changes that war is bringing. It's not only his country-aristocratic view of sexual modesty, although that's a large part of it. No, mostly Colpeper's obsession is with making other people see Chillingbourne, not as a point on a longer passageway but as a distinct location, a place with centuries-old specificity. In short, Colpeper aims to short-circuit the urban / rural mobility that is endemic to the modern age, and that two wars have only amplified.
Little wonder, then, that Colpeper's weapon of choice is liquid paste-pot glue. He is trying to bind the local women into a sort of living scrapbook, hoping to halt the unavoidable evolution of Great Britain. (To borrow a title from that avatar of the coming age, Georges Méliès, "Good Glue Sticks.")
