A Canterbury Tale

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale opened in 1944 — between The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and I Know Where I'm Going! — and was widely misunderstood on first release. Audiences and critics expected a conventional wartime morale film and received instead a strange, mystical pastoral about three modern pilgrims, an unsolved petty crime, and the transmission of memory across centuries. The film entered the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, fifty years after the brothers had largely been recognised as the most distinctive British filmmakers of their era.

Three travellers — Sergeant Bob Johnson (John Sweet, a real American GI), Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), and the land girl Alison Smith (Sheila Sim) — meet by accident at a wartime Kent station and find themselves 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 largely a pretext; the film's real subject is the slow folding of these three lives into the landscape of the Pilgrims' Way, the Canterbury Cathedral, and 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 among the most beautiful work of British wartime cinema. The film's reputation has steadily climbed; Powell's late-life autobiography places it as the personal favourite of his career.