Golden oldie returns to please
A Canterbury Tale
Sheila Sim, Dennis Price, John Sweet, Eric Portman,.
Dir: Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell.
By: Alexander Walker
London Evening Standard. 23 Feb 2000
It is amusing to remember that Emeric Pressburger, one half of the Archers
production team, whose other was of course Michael Powell, had been refused
permission to visit the unit on location in Kent when they made A Canterbury
Tale. Pressburger, you see, was Hungarian by birth; therefore, officially
an enemy alien in wartime Britain and restricted in where he could travel.
[Which is why I love
the photo
at left (click for larger version)
"P&P at Canterbury (or are they?)"
No they're not. They're at the replica they built of the Catheral (or various
parts of it) at Denham.]
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Dennis Price, Sheila Sim and John Sweet:
fate throws them together
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That's the world that this very curious film introduces us to: a world still
in pre-war, even feudal shape, with blacksmiths, wheelwrights, local squires
and rolling English roads co-existing with blackouts, air raid wardens,
land girls and Yanks in uniform. For different reasons (none too plausible
in Pressburger's script), Sheila Sim's land girl, Dennis Price's British
soldier and John Sweet's American one all get out at the same country station
[It's VERY plausible & clear from the script - Has he actually watched the
film?
Sheila Sim was to be working for Colpepper, Dennis Price was to be stationed
at the nearby Army camp and John Sweet misheard the announcement.]
- Chillingbourne - and run into a character who might have belonged to a
Hammer Horror: the Glueman. He doesn't suck blood, he pours glue into the
hair of any local lass unpatriotic (or sexy) enough to go out with men at
night, especially American men. Eric Portman plays this nutter, an English
puritan gone to bad seed.
Michael Powell calls the film 'a morality play about three modern pilgrims'.
The critics of the day called it something else: 'unpleasant', 'unsavoury'
and - the most dismissive adjective then in current English use - 'unnecessary'.
(Remember the disapproving wartime economy slogan: 'Is your journey really
necessary?') It was the earliest hint of the antipathy that Powell and Pressburger
could awaken in film critics who, nearly 20 years later, were to devour
Peeping Tom.
[It wasn't the earliest. Remember what the Sydneyan Society had said about
all the films from Blimp onwards (and maybe before)]
The notion of a misogynist (who possessed goodness knows what
other English vices) who messed up girls' hair-dos was a piece of erotica
not well understood, or at least admitted in 1944. 'Not till 33 years later,'
Powell wrote in his autobiography, 'was A Canterbury Tale recognised as
one of our most original, iconoclastic and entertaining films.' Also, he
might have added, the most beautiful outdoor production of its period, with
Erwin Hillier's camerawork catching the radiant look of the land in the
last years before post-war despoilation. Press shown on May 9, just three
days after the Normandy landings
[The D-Day landings were on June 6th, 1944 Alexander], its happily coincidental use of a martial
peal of Canterbury cathedral bells taking over from the hymn 'Onward, Christian
Soldiers' felt like a boon and a blessing - and still does.
NFT, South Bank, SE1 (020-7928 3232), Wed 1, Thurs 2 and Sat 4 March
© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 23 February 2000
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