A Canterbury Tale

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale came out in 1944, between The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and I Know Where I'm Going!, and was badly misunderstood on release. Audiences and critics expected a conventional wartime morale film. What they got was a strange, mystical pastoral about three modern pilgrims, an unsolved petty crime and the passing of memory down the centuries. It entered the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, fifty years after the pair had largely been recognised as the most distinctive British filmmakers of their era.

Three travellers meet by accident at a wartime Kent station: Sergeant Bob Johnson (John Sweet, a real American GI), Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) and the land girl Alison Smith (Sheila Sim). Soon they are trying to identify the local Glue Man, a strange figure who pours glue into the hair of women caught out at night with soldiers. The investigation is mostly a pretext. What the film cares about is how these three lives slowly fold into the landscape of the Pilgrims' Way and Canterbury Cathedral, and into the haunted continuity of English place.

Erwin Hillier's deep-shadowed black-and-white photography of the Kent landscape (the corn-stooks at sunset, the cathedral nave at evensong) is some of the most beautiful work in British wartime cinema. The film's reputation has climbed steadily since, and Powell's late-life autobiography names it the personal favourite of his career.