Report for the Kentish Express
By: Paul Tritton
'A CANTERBURY TALE' 60th anniversary location walk
More than 50 devotees of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's classic
wartime movie A Canterbury Tale met at Chilham on Sunday (August 31) for
a guided walk to locations where several of its key scenes were created
60 years ago.
The film is all about the experiences of three latter-day pilgrims to
Canterbury during the last weekend in August 1943, and was filmed at
places in and around the Kentish Stour valley and the city in the summer
of that year.
Main destination for Sunday's 60th anniversary location walk was
Chilmans Downs, overlooking Chilham, where on the last Sunday in August
1943 Michael Powell began filming the memorable 'scene in the long
grass,' featuring Sheila Sim (now Lady Attenborough) and the late Eric
Portman as Land Army girl Alison Smith and Thomas Colpeper, JP.
The walkers gathered in the same place on the hillside to see Helen
Lawson, from Chartham, and Steve Crook, founder of the Powell &
Pressburger Appreciation Society, re-enact the scene.
Scenes that starred US Army Sergeant John Sweet, who on the last Sunday
in August 1943 joined Powell's cast to play 'Sgt Bob Johnson,' were
re-enacted at their locations at Chilham Mill and nearby Julliberrie's
Grave, a prehistoric long barrow.
Some of the film's action took place in cornfields at Stile Farm,
Chilham . On Sunday, eight-year-old Jonathan Smith from Stile Farm
played the roles of "Terry" and "Leslie" in recreations of the scenes
where Bob meets the leaders of two rival gangs of schoolboys, joins in
their spectacular 'river battle' and then invites them to a pow'wow at
which they agree to help identify the sinister 'glueman.'
Other memorable scenes recreated included the one in which a Bren Gun
Carrier commanded by 'Sgt Peter Gibbs' (Dennis Price), ambushed Alison
as she drove her horse and cart along the Pilgrims' Road.
John Clark, from Canterbury, who was a Chilham schoolboy in 1943,
described how he watched Powell's cameramen and cast at work at Chilham
Mill and Shottenden, and appeared with his mother in crowd scenes when a
military parade through Canterbury was filmed for in the closing scenes.
Co-leader of the walk, Paul Tritton (author of A Canterbury Tale -
Memories of a Classic Wartime Movie), read out an email from Michael
Powell's widow , Thelma Schoonmaker Powell, who wrote, 'I will be
thinking of you all. I wish I could be with you but at precisely the
moment you are enjoying a drink to celebrate the end of your anniversary
walk, I will be in a dark theatre in Montreal looking at "dailies" of
The Aviator with Martin Scorsese.' Thelma is Scorsese's film editor.
The event was the seventh annual reunion for A Canterbury Tale
enthusiasts. Details of next year's location walk will be announced on
www.Powell-Pressburger.org
More information about the trip
