A CANTERBURY TALE

by Kevin Koehler

What a peculiar little film this is.

In 1943, the filmmaking tandem of Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), probably best known for their expressionistic Technicolor fantasies (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus), found themselves enlisted into the war effort. Britain was about to be invaded, not by the Nazis, but by visiting Yankee soldiers preparing for D-Day and the retaking of the continent.

Overpaid, oversexed, and over here.

The purpose of A Canterbury Tale appears to be twofold - primarily, it's a welcoming to the Americans, celebrating the common language, heritage, and history between host and visitor. At odds with this is an obvious second goal, that being to encourage the Yanks to keep their things in their pants and out of virginal English women. We like you, just don't marry our daughters.

After a brief prologue set in medieval times (paying homage to the Chaucer classic from which the picture takes its title), we are set hurtling into the present (the present being 1943) with a hawk/Spitfire match-cut that would make Kubrick proud. What there is of a plot centers on three modern day "pilgrims" - a British soldier, an American G.I., and a woman newly recruited into the British Woman's Land Army. On their way to Canterbury, a brief detour in a strange English village is extended after the "landgirl" Alison is victimized by "the Glue Man," a mysterious nocturnal predator pouring "the sticky stuff" into the hair of the poor women of Chillingbourne. The three travelers set about solving the mystery of the Glue Man, and wouldn't you know it, learn something about the culture and customs of the English countryside while they're at it.

The film received a fair amount of notoriety at the time, not wholly positive, regarding the suggestive nature of the Glue Man. Indeed, his bizarre crime recalls that of Multiple Miggs of Silence of the Lambs (or even There's Something About Mary), by which he was encouraged to swallow his own tongue. It's an act, one can't help but assume, of sublimated sexual desire (a theme the Archers would revisit with enthusiasm in Black Narcissus). Notably, a later discussion of the Glue Man (between the victim and a female coworker) occurs over lunch, between hardy gulps from an oversized bottle of milk.

Ultimately, as the film seeks to reconcile piety and unaffected living with modernity, sex, and war, our three pilgrims "follow the Old Road," finding unexpected "blessings" in the titular town of Canterbury as reward for abstinence (symbolic and literal). A girlfriend reappears (after a presumed cuckolding), a husband rises from the dead, and a childhood dream is fulfilled (in a church, natch), all with the magical-realism that would come to define the Powell-Pressburger partnership. But don't let the romanticism deceive you - after a parade through town, the boys are sent off to battle with a rousing rendition "Onward Christian Soldier." There are two wars to be won, after all: the one on the battlefield and the one at home.

Interesting footnote: An earlier draft of the script for A Canterbury Tale replaced the Glue Man with an individual who simply tore at the skirts of his female victims with scissors, lest anyone think I exaggerate the underlying sexual symbolism (and indeed, malevolence) of "the sticky stuff."

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.