My favourite film: A Canterbury Tale

I first watched A Canterbury Tale with my father, nearly 20 years ago. He warned me that while he liked it, most people did not. It was too flawed, too rum, it didn’t hang together. So we sat in the lounge and saw the hawk turn into the fighter plane and the trainload of pilgrims pull into Kent and the first, scurrying escape of the “glue-man”, who pours adhesive into the hair of the girls who date the soldiers – and about half an hour in, my dad hit the pause button and asked if I maybe wanted to watch something else instead. “No, it’s OK, I like it,” I muttered, because it’s always easier to say that we like things as opposed to what I really wanted to say, which was that I loved it, that I was choked by it and that, in that moment, I had no desire to watch anything else, ever again. And that would he please, for the love of God, hit the play button right now – now! – and then leave the remote control alone for the rest of the picture.

I revisited A Canterbury Tale again a few months back and was relieved to find it just as magical as ever. This ensures that it has briefly shuffled to the top of a stack of my other “favourite films” (there are about 20 or 30 of them; it’s not the most exclusive club), though I still hesitate to shove it to the fore, because it’s a thing of such fragile, broken glory, like some tubercular saint, that I hate the thought of people laughing at it. Even its director, Michael Powell, wasn’t especially fond of A Canterbury Tale. He felt that Emeric Pressburger’s script was at fault and that this dragged the film off course, whereas I’d argue that the cracks are what give it that crucial layer of strangeness and that the rambling detours lead to the richest, wildest rabbit-holes of all.

It was shot in 1943, in Powell’s home county, during the dog days of the second world war and charts the fortunes of three modern-day pilgrims (land girl, British soldier, US sergeant) en-route to Canterbury but waylaid for a few days in the neighbouring village of Chillingbourne. None of them want to be there; they would rather be at home, except they are so tired, lonely and saddle-sore that they scarcely know where home is anymore. The film throws them together and has them solve a local mystery. Then it cuts the ties and turns them loose, batting the pilgrims onward to Canterbury where they wander the bombsites and blank spaces of the town centre; their worlds a mess, their futures uncertain. Eventually, against all the odds, they each receive a blessing.

A Canterbury Tale may be the most loving and tender film about England ever made. It’s a picture that’s steeped in nature, in thrall to myth and history; a re-affirmation of the English character, customs and countryside from a time when many viewers may have wondered whether this underpinning had been kicked clean away. But the film’s genius lies in the way it connects these big, sweeping themes to the intimate, the eccentric and the everyday. It’s the human details that give it life, and the film is always beautifully played – particularly by Eric Portman as the rigid local magistrate and Dennis Price as a hard-bitten soldier who refuses to name the thing he loves.

On beginning this blog, I was going to write that the story of A Canterbury Tale is a bit like the legend of the Arthurian knights asleep on the hillside, waiting to be called forth at the hour of greatest need. But that’s not quite right, because the film implicitly suggests that there is no hillside, no sleeping knights, and no magical horn to call them forth. The only world is the one we’re in, bashed about and bent out of shape, and the only heroes the people around us: frail and fearful, sometimes misguided, and coping as best they can. But if we can learn to trust them, and invite them to trust us back, then we may just be OK. More than that, we might even be blessed; rattling through the ruins to uncover miracles in derelict caravans and hear the voice of angels in the train whistle’s yelp.