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The Powell & Pressburger Pages

Dedicated to the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and all the other people, both actors and technicians who helped them make those wonderful films.

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Submitted by Mark Fuller

The Canterbury Tale (sic)

By Winifred Horrabin


From: Tribune
20 May 1944


THE CANTERBURY TALE has superb photography, too*, this time of England's peasants and their countryside. But it has a very odd plot about a patriotic J.P. Squire who pours glue on girls' hair to stop them going out after dark with soldiers! What Americans will make of it Heaven alone knows. Happily, the best acting is done by an amateur, Sergeant Sweet, of the U.S Army, as charming and as endearing a performance as we have seen, so that Anglo-American relations may still survive, for the doughboy finds men after his own heart - and craft - in a Kent village not far from Canterbury. They may even survive the squire's glue-pot, the bewildering plot and the pristine purity of J.A. Rank's Eagle-Lion Company, who, apparently, have never heard of modern psychology and what it has discovered about the symptoms of sexual repression in magistrates!

* They also reviewed another bucolic film, of Mexican village life, The Forgotten Village by John Steinbeck and Herbert Kline, released the same week.


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