This film is available on VHS in the USA and the UK
In the perfect English summer of 1943, while the Allies were relieving
Sicily, Thomas Culpepper,
[It's "Colpeper" in the cast list - the herbalist was "Culpepper"]
gentleman farmer and magistrate of the East Kent
village of Chillingbourne, was assaulting young women in the blackout. On
the nights he was assigned air-warden duty, Colpepper would conceal himself
in the shadows of the ancient streets and dart out incognito to dump glue
on the hair of Fee Baker, Gwladys Swinton, Dorothy Bird, Polly Finn, and
others. The sticky stuff was hard to get out. It served Colpepper's
puritanical purposes well: the girls became too scared to date the
sex-hungry soldiers encamped outside Chillingbourne and were less likely
to cheat on their husbands and boyfriends overseas. And with females scarce
and nothing much to do until the pubs opened, some soldiers were tempted
to attend Colpepper's lectures about the Old Pilgrims' Road that wended
its
way past Chillingbourne to Canterbury Cathedral.
Colpepper, Colpepper - the name blows hot and cold at the same time and
makes you think of a medieval herbalist. Presumably descended from the
courtier (Robert Donat in The Private Life of Henry VIII) who unwisely slept
with his king's fifth wife, this glue-pouring terrorist was dreamed up by
Emeric Pressburger for his and Michael Powell's 1944 film A Canterbury Tale,
the Archers' followup to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp ('43). He was
played by Eric Portman, not a "man of Kent" like Powell but a 41-year-old
Yorkshireman who made Colpepper a supercilious home-counties crusader
championing England's national heritage.
Three young conscripts, the English sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price),
the American sergeant Bob Johnson (Sgt. John Sweet), and the landgirl Alison
Smith (Sheila Sim), spend the weekend in Chillingbourne trying to nail the
glueman after his Friday-night attack on Alison. Their sleuthing is an
excuse for a series of rural epiphanies; by the end of the film, Colpepper
has emerged as a beneficent magus, an agent of divine blessings. In the
majestic last movement - cut to Allan Gray's zigzagging medley of Bach's
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a military marching tune, "Onward Christian
Soldiers," and a choral refrain - the grieving Alison learns that her lover,
an RAF pilot supposedly killed by enemy action, has been found alive in
Gibraltar; Peter, a cinema organist in peacetime, fulfills his wish to play
a cathedral organ before being shipped to the front; and Bob is given a
packet of letters from the girlfriend he'd suspected of forsaking him.
The blessings complete these modern pilgrims' education in the pantheistic
mysticism of the English countryside, of which Colpepper is also the
instrument. Even before they leave Chillingbourne, they have come to feel
a contagious sense of well-being, as would Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) on
the Isle of Mull in the next Archers film, I Know Where I'm Going! ('45).
Rhythm has everything to do with this contagion, and it's worth examining
how Powell and Pressburger ease A Canterbury Tale from perverse
comedy-thriller into perverse Romantic pastoral.
The film begins, of course, with the Archers logo, an arrow thudding into
a bull's-eye, and sustains the medievalism with its depiction of the prologue
to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, during which the Wife of Bath shoves
one of her fellow travelers off his horse and the Knight unleashes his falcon.
There follows a clunky 600-year jump cut as the soaring bird turns into
a fighter plane.
[Clunky??]
Suddenly, the Knight has become an English "Tommy," armored
cars are rolling along the Pilgrims' Way, and a Canterbury-bound passenger
train is speeding through the Kent fields on a sunny day. (The ape-tossed
bone that metamorphoses into a spacecraft in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
possibly has its origins in this sequence.)
Day fades into night and the train disgorges Bob, Peter, and Alison at
Chillingbourne Station, where station master Thomas Duckett (tartly played
by Charles Hawtrey, later of Carry On . . . fame) rebukes the American,
who thinks he's alighting in Canterbury, for jumping off a moving train.
In the confusion, the glueman attacks Alison and runs up the lane toward
the
town hall with Peter and Bob in pursuit. They lose him: Peter catches a
bus
to the army camp, and Bob and Alison burst into the blazing light of the
townhall, where the local officials are flummoxed by the news of the latest
"incident." Upstairs, Bob and Alison are granted audiences with Colpepper,
whose guilt as the nocturnal predator is quickly revealed, but only to us.
Put up for the night at an inn, Bob and Allson determine to catch the
glueman.
Breathlessly, at a gallop, Powell and Pressburger have presented medieval
pilgrims, the British homefront during the Second World War, and a veiled
sexual assault on a woman - all in 24 minutes. Now the Archers rein the
movie in, slowing it down to ambling pace, lulling their young pilgrims
into a contemplative two days that drive the imperatives of the war out
of their minds.
Bob wakes in a four-poster once slept in by Elizabeth I; finds a
kindred spirit in the Chillingbourne wheelwright, Jim Horton (Edward Rigby);
then bums a ride in Alison's cart - she's been hired to work at a hop farm
- to the hill beside the Pilgrims' Road, where they compare notes about
their lost loves.
That Saturday evening, Colpepper gives one of his lantern-slide
lectures, which fascinates the three visitors more than they'd anticipated.
Its magicianliness is nostalgic for cinema's primitive prehistory, as is
Dr. Reeves's "camera obscura" in A Matter of Life and Death. Both come from
Powell, investing Colpepper and Reeves with his own sense of himself as
an ardent but somewhat remote showman.
The next day, Sunday, Bob delightedly witnesses a river-and-land battle
between two friendly gangs of boys whose generals he enlists to help snare
the glueman. Up on the hill again, "hearing" the lutesong and laughter of
Chaucer's prigrims and the jingle and clop of their horses, Alison stumbles
upon Colpepper straining to catch the same vibrations. She sits with him,
and you get the feeling that this cold misogynist has fallen a little in
love with the lovely, plain-speaking landgirl: the biter bit. At the
approach of Peter and Bob, they duck down in the grass and overhear the
two soldiers discussing Colpepper's motives. The spell of the country idyll
is broken; on Monday morning it's off to Canterbury, ten minutes by train,
via Thomas Duckett's station and his caustic comments.
Setting aside Colpepper's unconscious motives for a moment, his evident
culpability in A Canterbury Tale makes it a "whydunit" rather than a
"whodunit." The movie is a High Tory lesson in cultural conservationism
- Colpepper was elected by the villagers to protect the bend in the Pilgrims'
Road - that extends beyond the earthquake of war. "Who cares about these
things in wartime?" Peter remonstrates to Colpepper at the lecture. "Who
cares about them in peacetime?" Colpepper rejoins. The war, you could say,
is his blessing, his opportunity to remind the soldiers in his audience
of the values that were being threatened by Hitler, and the Archers'
opportunity to get the same message across to their audience.
Powell recognized that the kinky premise of the film could facilitate this.
"Emeric thought up the glueman," he told me in 1986. "We had some rather
important things we wanted to say in A Canterbury Tale, so when he proposed
this almost sexual idea of a man pursuing girls in the blackout and dropping
glue on them, I thought, 'Oh, Christ, this is going to stop the staid
British in their tracks.' I thought I'd better not tell Emeric, because
he might abandon the idea. To try and put over these very serious ideas
about England and America and the values we were fighting for might have
turned the film into a self-praising documentary, so instead of that I let
the glueman ride. I said to myself, 'I think I can get away with it.' But
I
couldn't."
[The original idea was to have the attacker slash the girl's dresses]
For all the twists and turns of its conundrum plot, A Canterbury Tale is
rigorously structured through a complex pattern of correspondences,
serendipities, and visual and verbal rhymes that echo the rhythmical
qualities of English country life and invite Britain's younger ally across
the pond into the pageant. The kindly, folksy G.I. Bob (soulfully played
by the USO actor Sweet) is a moviegoer more than an intellectual, and no
convert to English telephones or tea-drinking habits; but he is an avid
recipient of the bits of Chillingbourne civic history and folklore dispensed
to him by Duckett and the women who work at the inn where he's staying.
As well as bonding with the wheelwright in their conversation about the
seasoning of timber, Bob befriends a fellow pipe-smoking soldier (Esmond
Knight) at Colpepper's lecture, and confides in Alison. A year and a half
after Pearl Harbor, he is Powell and Pressburger's full-fledged symbol of
anti-isolationism, and his crowning moment comes when he stands rapt in
the nave of Canterbury Cathedral and welds Britain and America together
with the awestruck reflection,
"And my dad built the first Baptist church in Oregon ..."
As seen through Bob's eyes, the film is a repository of Englishness
- not just in artifacts like the four-poster, the ducking stool in Colpepper's
office, or the plaque outside the Colpepper Institute, but in his
understanding of the timeless throb of that culture, which makes him reflect
on its American counterpart.
Alison, a shopgirl in a London department store before the war, is visiting
Chillingbourne for the second time. Three years before, she stayed with
her archaeologist boyfriend Geoffrey in a caravan on the bend on the Pilgrims'
Road and (as Powell says in A Life in Movies) lost her virginity to him
there. Though spurned by Colpepper as an employee during their first
meeting, she offers to donate to his institute's museum the Roman coins
that Geoffrey had found in a dig. Colpepper discovers to his embarrassment
that it is one of his female victims who understands his mission best.
Peter, abrasive and cynical, the least persuadable of the three pilgrims,
grows to admire Colpepper, although he still intends to denounce him. An
urban materialist, he has easily become friends with the spiritual country
boy Bob, and they toss a ball at each other as they stroll along a sunlit
street and share blackberries by the Old Pilgrims' Road. (Bob and Alison
share cigarettes, as if they were in a Howard Hawks movie). Peter
subsequently finds a kindred spirit in the cathedral organist, whose great
rival, it transpires, was the younger man's professor at the Royal Academy
of Music. The coincidence may seem arbitrary, throwaway, but, like Reg
Horton (George Merrit) telling Alison that his own father was a blacksmith,
it is another example of a traditional art being passed from one generation
to the next.
Archers scholar Ian Christie argued in an essay on Pressburger's problematic
status in their oeuvre ("Alienation Effects," BFI Monthly Film Bulletin,
October 1984) that the writer knew fully "that the narrative of A Canterbury
Tale should be subservient to image and incident, that it should produce
the poetic juxtaposition on which the film depends for its true meaning."
Accordingly, the skein of newly formed friendships, cross-references, and
arcane parallels background the narrative thrust - the investigation of
the glueman - and provide the basis of the film's hypnotic beat, echoed
by
Gray's rhapsodic orchestration with its repeated lyrical themes, and such
recurring motifs as the sounds of Chaucer's pilgrims. Not the least of the
correlatives to the ebb and flow of history evinced in the progress of the
three contemporary pilgrims is the film itself, with all its cuts,
dissolves, and ellipses.(*)
Powell and Pressburger often traded in illusionism: the characters in their
films contrive to see what they want to see. This "Indian Rope Trick" (as
it's called by Clive Candy in Blimp when he sees Miss Hunter reincarnated
in the nurse, Barbara, his future wife) is reiterated by several
sleights-of-camera here. Rhetorically scorning the idea that a halo should
ever appear above his head, Peter is immediately crowned by a burst of
sunlight as the Monday morning train to Canterbury exits from a tunnel:
a harbinger of Colpeper's unearthly powers. A few minutes later, Peter asks
the cathedral organist if he's the cathedral organist and is admonished
with the words, "Do I look like the charwoman?" - only for that lady to
appear on her knees with bucket and sponge beside Bob in the nave.
What is more, she (or her Scottish equivalent) fetches up anecdotally -
a typical Powellian private joke - with a bar of music from A Canterbury
Tale
in the hotel where Joan lunches with Torquil in I Know Where I'm Going!
The fluttering hymn sheet that leads Peter up the steps to the organ also
"returns" in IKWIG as the list of directions Joan drops on the quayside,
hindering her journey to the island where the wrong suitor awaits her. In
both films, magic forces are at work, disturbing order, causing chaos,
making "strange," but leading Powell and Pressburger's unwitting pilgrims
to a transcendent mystical union with their environs.
Most potent of all are the sudden Puckish materializations of Colpepper
in his garden when Alison and Bob ride by, sitting up in the grass on the
hill to surprise Alison, outside the Canterbury garage when she is weeping
over her decaying caravan. "Puckish" is the operative word, for Colpepper
is
an adult version of the Puck who spins a series of adventures - of a Roman
centurion, a Norman knight, a Renaissance artisan, and English villages
of the past - for two Edwardian children, in Puck of Pook Hill, Powell's
favorite book as a child. Set in Sussex, adjacent to Kent, Rudyard Kipling's
1906 novel initiates these children into taking their "place/ As men and
women with our race" through the acquisition of knowledge about England
as an eternal, unchanging land with psychically deep-rooted traditions.
Initiation is precisely what Colpepper is about, too, and in Alison's case
the pouring of glue on her hair is a kind of baptism.
Powell was not satisfied with the film. This is him writing in the second
volume of his autobiography, Million-Dollar Movie: "Why is it that legend
is more potent than reality at stirring the emotions? Why do the songs and
tales of our fathers and mothers touch our imagination more than our own
personal experience as children? When I agreed to make A Canterbury Tale
I expected that it would be a far more personal film than it turned out
to be.
I was working, creating a story in the county I was born in, the 'garden
of England', a chalky country of bare downs and shallow valleys, of chestnut
woods and little chuckling streams, of slowly turning water and windmills,
and white-capped oasthouses with the bittersweet smell of hops drying in
the kiln. All this I knew from childhood, yet somehow I failed to get it
on the screen."
He was right in this respect. The edenic Kent he remembered was thankfully
for us - transfigured in A Canterbury Tale into a place less easily
encapsulated into the bucolic calendar photograph he describes. The
immediacy of making the movie in wartime and Powell's virtuosity as a
metteur-en-scene cut through his nostalgia, enabling him to create something
far more interesting. For all its pastoralism, A Canterbury Tale is a film
on the edge of noir that never quite takes the plunge. Stylistically, it
is a long flirtation with Expressionism: Alison silhouetted at the station
as she stubs her cigarette out; Colpepper silhouetted by his projector's
beam at the lecture; tightly lit closeups on the main characters' eyes;
a
deep-focus shot of the village idiot (Esmond Knight again) standing in mist
at the end of a lane. Erwin Hillier's lambent cinematography is a virtual
shadowplay.
And coursing through the film is a weird sexual energy. "I'm still a maid,"
Prudence Honeywood, Alison's fortyish employer, confesses to her within
an hour or two of their meeting. Her sister tells Bob a ribald joke about
the bed he just slept in at the inn. Colpeper's Freudian attacks on the
girls
may have a cultural rationale, but it is also the work of a troubled man;
whether or not it's the girls he desires or their would-be soldier escorts
is never made clean There is a homosexual implication in the fact that he
lives with his mother, but his attraction to Alison is palpable. "Life is
full of disappointments," he tells her in the Canterbury garage a moment
before she learns her lover is alive. Straight or gay, pansexual or asexual,
the glueman is the archetypally repressed Archers hero.
The same summer Colpepper was on the rampage, my father, a 14-year-old
school leaver in 1943, was working as an apprentice wheelwright, making
spokes from oak, ash, and elm for a blacksmith in the rural village of
Yeoford in Devonshire. "Everything has its season," he said, echoing Jim
Horton in A Canterbury Tale, when I told him about this article. Just such
a boy as my father might have been at that time can be seen in the wheelwright
sequence, along with the real Horton brothers, Benjamin and Neville, whom
Powell had known since childhood. I allude to this not out of sentiment,
but to confirm Powell's point that our parents' tales affect us far more
than our own childhood experiences. And as with family yarns, so it is with
the
long-woven tapestry of national culture. If it errs on the side of
Anglocentrism (understandable during wartime), A Canterbury Tale beautifully
celebrates the notion that England's mythic past is just a jump-cut back
in time.
