A Canterbury Tale begins with a mellifluous voice intoning the famous opening lines to Chaucer's cycle of poems. The camera shows lords and ladies on horseback, then, representatives of various estates and trades in medieval England in a merry procession with lots of laughter and antics. A lord unhoods his falcon and unleashes the raptor and a shot of the bird winging its way through the sky dissolves into an image of a fighter plane, at the same scale and position in the screen as the fowl -- this is a startling effect that Stanley Kubrick must have seen: in 2001, a bone thrown by a primate into the sky turns into a space-ship. After this jovial and convivial prologue the film turns dark immediately in the most literal manner -- an American service man, Bob Johnson, a British soldier, and a young woman all disembark from a train during black-out. (The first five minutes of this scene are shot in pitch darkness in which only the faintest glimmers of light illumine fragments of faces and bits of architecture -- we can't see what is going on and, for good reason: a strange crime is committed but the act takes place in such Stygian darkness that we can't see the misdemeanor nor its perpetrator.) Someone has thrown glue into the hair of the young woman -- this is the so-called "glue-man", a shadowy figure who puts sticky stuff in young women's hair requiring that it be bleached out or, in some cases, cut off. Most of the film will revolve around efforts by the protagonists to solve the mystery of the "glue-man" and his motives which seem to be sexually fraught. Already, the film is profoundly perverse, not only in its subject matter but in the way that the movie is directed. A film celebrating the glories of English patriotism begins (after the prologue) in utter darkness with us glimpsing what seems to be sex crime. Even more perverse, the movie's bizarre lighting conceals the identity of the villain but, in the very next scene, we are introduced to the perpetrator and shown clues that establish in an obvious way that this man, an antiquarian named Colpeper is the criminal. So the entire ruse of casting the opening scenes in pitch darkness are subverted by the film's following sequence in which we are shown who committed the act. (This sequence is so brazen that we doubt our own eyes and, in fact, most of the rest of the film has to catch up with this opening disclosure -- the identity of the criminal is finally confirmed about 15 minutes before the end of the 126 minute film, after we have long known, pretty much for sure, who did the deed.)
The American has got off the train at the wrong station and, so, most of this Canterbury tale doesn't take place in that city. In fact, we don't even get a glimpse of Canterbury and its famous cathedral until mid-way in the movie. The protagonist of this British propaganda film is not an Englishman but an American from Oregon who has misunderstood the patter of the station master and exited the train at the wrong stop. After showing us the learned but misogynistic Colpeper (he keeps a dunking stool for female gossips in his office), the movie, then, diverts into an amiable and slow-paced comedy about British country life, demonstrated to us through encounters between the American (who is from the country himself) and his English counterparts. The young woman is a so-called "Land girl" --that is a London pink-collar worker who had gone to the country to do agricultural labor that men would ordinarily perform were they not all fighting the Germans. (The town is populated by spinsters, old men, and little boys.) There is a curiously detailed conversation about curing lumber for construction use -- in this craft, both the local Englishmen and the American share a vocational interest. The young woman works beside an older lady who is, as she says, "yet a maid" -- not having found a man congenial to her interests. There is more leisurely conversation involving the shortage of men during the war and Alison, the "Land Girl" says that her fiancee is missing in action and presumed dead. She recalls a visit to the village in a "Caravan" -- that is a camping trailer -- and the word, of course, summons to mind the sojourn of the pilgrims in the country before entering Canterbury. Bob Johnson, Alison, and the cynical British officer come to a military camp in the country are all pilgrims of a sort. Each is worried by his or her own grief, sad and troubled. Johnson is a tourist who wants to see the celebrated cathedral but ends up detoured in the quest to unmask the "glue-man"; he's mourning the loss of his sweetheart who has ceased writing to him. The British officer is an organist, although he has played professionally only in cinemas -- he's skeptical and cynical. Alison has come to this place out of nostalgia -- she recalls her happy memories with her vanished fiancee and the place they camped on the hilltop with view of Canterbury. Colpeper hosts a lecture and speaks lyrically about ancient times, encouraging a group of servicemen who had come to hear him speak to imagine the exact textures of reality six-hundred years earlier, a reality of woods and enclosures, wild flowers and hay and blue skies that is not that much different from what the soldiers experience during their maneuvers. (Colpeper's silhouette lectures from the center of great lunar-shaped flare of light; one of the servicemen notes that he dislikes "magic lantern" lectures because the audio-visual equipment always is balky -- something that occurs in this lecture as well.) Young men in armored amphibious vehicles careen recklessly around the country, rooting up the ancient pilgrim's road, and nearly colliding with Alison who is languidly guiding a hay wagon over the rutted trail -- the dreamy, almost hallucinatory slowness of her wagon contrasts with the frenetic activity of the armored vehicles and results in a stand-off between the hay wain and war machine. (With the benefit of hindsight, we understand that the troops are training for the amphibious landings on Normandy.) A group of children stage a war game of their own, demonstrating another anti-propagandist perspective: war is a form of play that boys enjoy -- although it's serious sport, it is, nonetheless, a form of sport, something that Alison instinctively grasps.
After World War II, mobs seized women who had collaborated with the Germans and shaved off their hair. It turns out that Colpeper is engaged in a sort of misogynistic terrorism that is similar. He is concerned that the women are too interested in the soldiers at the camp (and the Americans) and, accordingly, spies on them and, when involved in romantic trysts, deters these encounters by spilling glue on the unfaithful women's hair. Colpeper is an eccentric, a kind of person that the British celebrate for his individuality -- being eccentric is a kind of art in the U. K. But he is also obsessional and dangerously close to insanity. He rants monomanically on the train to Canterbury and the organist officer, attending a religious service for the troops about to depart for D-Day, vows to turn Colpeper into the authorities. But, suddenly, a great halo of light glows around the head of the soldier and we sense that the film is now entering the domain of the uncanny. At Canterbury, Bob Johnson is moved to whisper to himself the name and founding date of the Baptist Church that he attends in Three Sisters, Oregon. The organist, looking for a local police chief, wanders into the cathedral where a piece of dropped sheet music leads him into the organ loft. There the Cathedral musician invites him to play the great organ, observing kindly that his own first job was playing in a circus. Remarkably, the British soldier chooses to play Bach's famous prelude in G-Minor -- that is, the music of a German composer. Alison goes to a garage where the caravan is being stored; moths are eating everything inside of it and the tires have been requisitioned for the rubber. Later, she walks down the mutilated central avenue in Canterbury observing the pits and quarry-like holes where German bombs have destroyed shops. The problems of each of the Canterbury pilgrims are miraculously solved by pure deus ex machina means -- the implausibility of these happy endings is intended: pilgrims seek out Canterbury so that they may receive blessings. The organist, diverted from his plan to inform on Colpeper, plays "Onward Christian Soldiers" and the camera executes rapturous maneuvers tracking the legions of men marching into the Cathedral. The film's texture is poetic, even lyric -- although there are certain war-time messages encoded into the action, they are delivered so perversely or eccentrically as to be all but invisible. (In fact, the film was too subtle for 1944 and audiences didn't particularly like it -- the creepy "glue-man" plot with its implications of sexual deviance disconcerted viewers.) This picture is one of a string of Powell and Pressburger masterpieces made during the war and immediate post-war period and its an indelible experience. The film's point, I think, is that the war effort demands that each do his or her best, but that this doesn't require the elimination of different, even eccentric, points of view -- if the British were to become highly regimented, like the Germans, this wouldn't be worth the victory. The film dramatizes how people of very different persuasions and temperaments can work together to achieve a common end. But this message is blurred by so much poetry that it's almost indiscernible.
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