Great Britain, 1944
Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Full cast and crew
(at the IMDb)
Bob Johnson, an American serviceman on his way to meet a friend in Canterbury,
gets out at a small village station by mistake in the blackout. Bewildered,
he is befriended by Alison Smith, a London salesgirl turned landgirl, and
Peter Gibbs, a British soldier on his way back to camp outside the village.
As they leave the station, a mysterious figure jumps from the shadows and
pours glue on Alison's hair. Bob and Peter give chase to the town hall,
but the only person there is the local magistrate, Thomas Colpeper, a gentleman
farmer for whom Alison has come to work, She learns that she is the glueman's
eleventh victim. and that Colpeper has no use for inexperienced landgirls.
Next day, she gets a job on another farm, while Bob, curious about the
glueman's identity, decides to stay on in order to help expose him. While
attending a lantern-slide lecture about the Pilgrim's Way by Colpeper (well-attended
since few local girls are willing to go out at night with servicemen for
fear of the glueman), Bob, Peter and Alison all come under the spell of
Colpeper's words. Alison is already familiar with this part of the country
from a pre-war holiday with, her archaeologist fiancé, now missing,
presumed dead, in action. Bob also fears that he has lost his girlfriend,
who is not answering his letters. Peter is a cynic who studied classical
music but opted instead for the money he can earn as a cinema organist.
With gangs of children enlisted in unmasking the glueman, all the evidence
points to Colpeper. Confronted on the train to Canterbury, he confesses
but pleads that he did it for the 'higher good': not only preventing local
girls from taking up with GIs while their husbands/boyfriends are away at
war, but boosting attendances at his lectures on the national heritage.
Peter intends to alert the police - but, once in Canterbury, the trio of
pilgrims find the blessings they receive outweigh any desire to bring the
glueman to book. Alison's fiancé is found to be alive; Bob's girlfriend
has joined the WACs and not been receiving his letters; Peter is given the
chance to play the great cathedral organ during a service for the departing
troops ...
A voice-over reads from The Canterbury Tales as the camera pans across a
map of the old Pilgrim's Way to the city, then live action takes over as
mediaeval falconers appear in the forest. A falcon soars through the air
and, in a cut prefiguring Kubrick's bone-into-spaceship as the voice-over
wonders what the historical pilgrims would see today, the falcon becomes
a Spitfire in a training flight above the Kent countryside and we have jumped
six hundred years to 1944. Britain is at war, and Powell-Pressburger are
apparently setting out to give an oblique view of 'Why We Fight'. But equally,
they seem to be dismissing the war as an occurrence of only momentary import,
in order to look at equally enduring yet infinitely more positive components
of the human condition, like love and trust and miracles.
The nominal storyline is the hunt for the glueman.
But as Powell-Pressburger tell the audience (visually) that Eric Portman
must be the culprit in his first scene, there is not really any suspense.
And the scenes detailing the trio's investigation are less about that
investigation than about their relationships with each other, their
seemingly lost loves (human and spiritual), the countryside and the
mystical, magical feelings in the air.
Less a storyline, then, more a narrative spine to which the other ideas
can be attached, so that watching the film becomes a sort of pilgrimage
for the audience.
For just as it seems to be going in one direction (after the glueman),
it ambles off in another, in quite leisurely fashion, setting up a unique,
hypnotic rhythm.
The American, Bob Johnson, for instance, gets into conversation
with a cherubic old wheelwright about timber, and they realise that their
respective knowledge and application of it is identical (hands across the
sea). Alison chats with her new employer about London, the harassment of
daily life there, the drear uniformity of back-to-back houses. "The only
man who ever asked me to marry him wanted us to live in a house like that'
says the other woman, and in one line her whole life is beautifully
crystallised.
These are precisely the kind of non-narrative scenes which are so rare in
British/American movies but which are infinitely human and revealing, and
establish a sort of 'realism' that is far more real than 'naturalism'.
Doubtless, though, the apparent confusions and complexities of the film
are one reason why it was a failure in its own time.
Take the first sequence proper: which other movie has ever introduced three
of its four main characters in an extended blackout scene, so that it is
impossible to see them clearly, except for brief moments in the glare of
torchlight? The dialogue that ensues (establishing who the people are,
but also one of the running themes---the American's confusion about English
life, language and attitudes) is made doubly confusing by Our inability
to see clearly who is talking. Paradoxically (or not), 'seeing' is really
what the film is about: seeing beyond surface appearances to the essence
of things. Thus Colpeper throws glue at Alison because she is out with
two soldiers, but he is both embarrassed and intrigued when he learns that
in many ways she is a sort of soul-sister who also has a love for the countryside,
if not for the same reasons he does. She spent an idyllic holiday in a
caravan with her archaeologist boyfriend on the very same hill which Colpeper
loves to visit in order to commune with the past; and those two lovers were
the people who found there the old coins which Portman has been eager to
study.
Another major sequence, the lantern-slide lecture, is also conducted in
semi-darkness, with only the projector light for illumination. This is
the first clear articulation of the film's particular mysticism (here primarily
that of the Christian church, of course, in contrast to
Black Narcissus
and
I Know Where I'm Going: whatever the context, this spirituality was
a major concern for Powell-Pressburger at the time). Colpeper, framed in
semi-silhouette against the circle of light on the screen behind him, talks
of his feelings of kinship with the early pilgrims who visited Canterbury
to "ask for a blessing or secure penance". His audience, including our
trio of investigators, is rapt, and Colpeper - glueman or not - clearly
emerges as the film's heart. In turn, the circle of light prefigures the
halo effect that strikes Peter Gibbs when, after Colpeper has admitted to
being the glueman and explained his motives, the train to Canterbury bursts
out of a tunnel and we cut immediately to a shot of the spires of the cathedral.
"At your age I didn't believe in anything" says Colpeper, "Now I believe
in miracles". Peter, the cynic, scoffs; "Perhaps you're an instrument"
murmurs Colpeper; "I'll believe that when I wear a halo round my head" Peter
scoffs anew, determined to turn the glueman over to the law-then pow!, the
halo effect (which, of course, Peter is unaware of). And indeed, by unexpectedly
getting the opportunity to play the cathedral organ and rediscovering the
feelings which led him to classical music (entirely non-religious, be it
noted), he thereby completes Colpeper's 'penance' by
not revealing his activities.
Floods of light also burst into the derelict caravan stored in war-ravaged
Canterbury, when Alison joyously pulls down the moth-eaten curtains at the
news that her dead lover is in fact alive, making the scene not only spiritual
(a visual metaphor for her 'blessing') but amazingly sensual too, with its
implication that the caravan will in time be a place of rapture. Powell's
use of light in these ways is reminiscent of Murnau's; and while there is
no close stylistic link between the two directors, Powell's attempts to
create a 'pure' cinema arguably make him one of the few true heirs to the
Mumau tradition. A scene with Alison and Bob Johnson, where they each talk
about their lost love the aching emotional beauty understanding that mark
many of Murnau's great scenes. And Powell's use of the tracking, craning
camera to introduce Colpeper, alone behind his desk in the town hall, is
a marvellous visual embodiment of the concept of 'judge', suggesting all
the irrationality, imperiousness and (typically) the loneliness implied
by that word.
From this first shot of Colpeper to the scene on the train where his reasons
are finally explained, the film's view of him is slowly modified to allow
for understanding and even a certain pity. This misogynist (a bachelor,
living alone with his mother, entirely self-absorbed and didactic) has had
his conceptions (misconceptions) entirely changed by knowing Alison. "Didn't
you think to ask the girls to your lectures?" she asks. "No". "Pity" is
all she says, but there's an extraordinary sense captured in his silence
that he knows she's right, and that he has indeed learned much. And it
is entirely fitting that Peter Gibbs, his most earnest opponent, should
be the instrument whereby he secures his penance (O.E.D.: "sacrament including
contrition, confession, satisfaction and absolution" - all of which are meticulously
entwined in the Powell-Pressburger web of complicity). But there is another
dimension to Colpeper's character. As John Russell Taylor suggests
(Sight and Sound, Autumn 1978), he is "a mischievous and unpredictable
force of nature, one of the dark gods ... working at once to disorient and
in the long run effectively to reorient people, destroying in order to
create".
Hence the 'satisfaction' contained in the penance.
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