England, 1944: After 5 long years of blitz, black-out, rationing and requisitioning, the World War hit hard on the Home Front. 'A Canterbury Tale' is a British wartime film appealing directly to the newly-arrived American allies to regard the sight of an English Cathedral spire, an old pilgrim road or clear skies over chalky uplands as worth fighting to preserve. A victory for our enemies, it seems to say, would mean an end to this spiritual continuity, and the heavy burden of defending it had fallen to us and our Comrades. Thus the film can be taken on one level as a straight-forward flag-waver.

But it is clearly more than this. The opening of the film, quoting loosely from Geoffrey Chaucer, depicts a medieval pilgrimage, the old Canterbury Pilgrims journeying to receive blessings or do penance. Fast-forward to wartime, and a different kind of pilgrim walks the way. Our boys are massing in the South to embark on the great mechanized Crusade that will determine the future of England and all that it stands for. Their task is an onerous one. But what's this? Girls out with soldiers in rural Kent get glue poured in their hair at night. What can it mean?

Powell and Pressburger take their time in spinning their story, but it's time we don't mind spending in Chillingbourne, wending our way with Alison and the farm cart, blackberrying on the Weald with Peter and Bob, chewing the fat with the locals, getting to know our pilgrims' histories and ultimately solving the Glue Man crimes. There are many meandering diversions along this particular road, and some bits of business are downright peculiar (the silhouetted village idiot scene and the young boys' play-fight spring to mind). But by degrees, the film's narrative themes begin to coalesce, and slowly we are taken somewhere very special indeed.

It's true, Thomas Colpeper - gentleman farmer and magistrate - is something of an oddity, but no small town is complete without its eccentric. There's a magnetic and sympathetic quality about him, too, as we see when Alison bitterly comments on her prospective In-Laws' refusal to accept she's good enough for their son: 'It would take an earthquake' she says, to which Colpeper calmly replies, 'We're having one.' As played by Eric Portman, he is at once coolly beguiling and strangely malevolent. His unmasking by our protagonists as the 'Glue Man' comes as no real surprise, but seemingly his motivation is only about assuring our connection with the land and its history, despite being himself irredeemably misogynistic to our modern eyes.

The final act, as the foursome complete their pilgrimages to Canterbury on the iron road, is a revelation; As they, and we, are propelled closer to the imposing Cathedral, the characters' stories are completed: Colpeper is set to do penance by turning himself in to the Police, Peter is told he was the instrument for this but instead gets a blessing of his own, Bob finally receives his girl's letters, (posted from Australia, "She's joined the WACs!"), and Alison is similarly blessed. Her scene in Mr Portal's Garage is especially moving, as the burden she carries is the hardest - the presumed death of her airman fiancé. Her barely-audible 'Why?' whispered in disbelief when told Master Geoffrey's father has waited with news for her for two weeks delivers a moving emotional payoff. Sheila Sim - now Lady Attenborough - gives a memorably natural performance throughout.

The film's luminous black and white photography is strong as is the location work in and around the recently-bombed Canterbury, and the use of music throughout adds a spiritual element to the visuals. My Favourite scene? The steam-hauled commuter train bearing our pilgrims from Chillingbourne pulls into Canterbury station, and Peter stands in the compartment to adjust his uniform collar. Apparently he's been the unwitting but skeptical instrument of Colpeper's penance, and his line 'I'll believe that when I see a halo around my head,' comes as the carriage window behind him is suddenly bathed in blinding morning sunlight. Brilliant.

Although I've heard that Michael Powell chose, over a skirt-slashing Colpeper, to instead have him be The Glueman, his choice is, I think, serendipitous. The Glueman is not just the (superficially, as most post-modern critics mistake about him and about so many other characters in earlier films - about which more later) repressed sexual pervert Glueman, but he's also the Clueman. Yes, he's vaguely sinister, but he provides the glue that diverts the film's younger, war-preoccupied characters from their immediate concerns, and he suggests the clues that connect them to the heritage (some of us Yanks know the words of 'Land Of Hope And Glory' because England/Britain is undeniably, in many respects, our Mother Country) that has shaped them and made them who they are - and to the Civilization for which they're fighting.

Too many of today's critics obsess about the "Lesbian" farm woman whose character, in the 1940's, would have been ordinary and been regarded as being ordinary: a woman raised under the sterner discipline and mores of her day, with no-nonsense, no-b.s. values of virtue, obligation and hard work - and of getting to the point. It's postmodernists' affectation to automatically suspect doughty, matter-of-fact women characters - any eccentric women characters whom their postmodernist Miss Jean Brodie nonsense has bent them to suspect of fitting their screwy postmodernist (i.e., most often Marxisant, but often also Romantic) worldview - in earlier films of being "Lesbians." This woman is, consummately, a farmer who has to consider pragmatically what all farmers have always had to consider: how to smartly, efficiently work their land to its top yield against time and weather, pests and parasites, poachers and market conditions; there's nothing "Lesbian" about any of her singleminded agrarian pragmatism, or about her unremarkable - for her day - country ladies' sartorial choice, or even about her puffing a cigarette.

'A Canterbury Tale' isn't among the best of Powell & Pressburger's efforts; but it doesn't fall far short of their best. In a spot or two the plot plods, but then plodding was the pace of the Kentish countryside, so I think that it's only to our early third millennium sensibilities that it seems to plod. Seldom has black & white cinematography managed, as it manages here, to communicate through chiaroscuro the pilgrims' unease, and through the blessed splendor of sunlit, cloud-garlanded vistas of the Weald of Kent their respite.

As the Glueman strives to communicate the pace, sensibilities, and sensations of Chaucer's pilgrim's time, so too must we latter-day viewers accommodate our viewing of this film to the pace, sensibilities, and sensations of its period and setting: once we've done that - which demands of us no extraordinary effort - the legendary, enduring Powell & Pressburger magic works its spell.

From the outset I found Sergeant Sweet's unaffected acting well-suited to the storytelling. The Yanks whom Wartime Britons recall were probably more like Mike Roczinsky, yet among those "overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here" American "invaders," among all those "brown jobs," were young men quite like Sweet's Bob Johnson. Dennis Price's manner is a bit too aristocratic for his portrayal of a sergeant, but on the whole Price's thespian gifts help him to carry off his role very well. Sheila Sim gives a perfectly iconic portrayal of a young woman of her time: bereaved but not crushed; proud yet considerate; tender yet not mawkish; vulnerable yet capable. Eric Portman's Glueman is appropriately mysterious and mildly menacing and yet, in the ending we discover that he's all along been a benign agent of illumination, the neutral but never indifferent catalyst, the benevolent spur to the young people's sleuthing to know their present through their coming to touch their collective past; the Glueman is, if you think about his role in the narrative, rather God-like - or, if your prefer, rather Nature-like.

What's lovely about the dénouement here is that it enchants without indulging in sodden kitschiness, and indeed that it enchants in spite of of its scant kitschy elements. In the end the Glueman vanishes from the pilgrim's and our ken because he's accomplished his task of cluing and gluing the pilgrims to their past, to the mystical dimension of Being in their Own Time as that Being can only have come about by dint of their having touched their Past in their Present, which is the predicate of their harboring good hope for their Future. This message, to people whom wartime exigencies shifted brusquely about en masse as people had hitherto never shifted about, may have rung in 'A Canterbury Tale's' contemporary audiences a chord of sentimental longing and welcome reassurance.

This is a thoroughly English film best appreciated when one knows that Powell grew up in rural Kent and that he loved his home county's loveliness as only a native can and does love eternally his childhood home - and the verities it imparts early to him. In our present age of rapidly successive, plug-in and plug-out residential and professional transience - the first age of nigh-universal human rootlessness - 'A Canterbury Tale's' blessing is its acquainting us with our 1940's forebears' more permanent, more grounded sense of themselves and their place in the world and in time, a sense which they felt the war had put under threat and had hurled them and their world, willy-nilly, into unsettling uncertainty. It seems unlikely that we - our species - shall ever again know the quiet certainties, tranquility, and satisfaction of lifelong residence in, or near, our birthplaces. Until our time urgency meant for people something quite different from what urgency means for us. If people before our hyper-active, attention-deficited, more artificial time were not more "authentic," then they were certainly far less remote than we've become from Nature's cycles and temper.

'A Canterbury Tale's' charm is quiet, subtle, and in the end it's sensual, mystical, illuminating, and eternally dear. Pity that few have nowadays the time or the temper for such charm.

... from writer-producer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A trio of (then) modern day pilgrims meet at a train station in Kent on their way to Canterbury: Alison (Sheila Sim), a young war widow; Peter (Dennis Price) a British army sergeant; and Bob (John Sweet), an American army sergeant on a 3-day furlough. The trio bond when Alison is attacked by the notorious "Glue Man", a mysterious figure who runs about at night dumping glue on unsuspecting ladies' heads. The townsfolk seem content to let the mystery lie, but the trio of newcomers are determined to find the culprit and bring him or her to justice. Meanwhile, they also take time to learn more about their surroundings in the English countryside, thanks to local historian Colpeper (Eric Portman).

This is an odd movie. The goofy-sounding Glue Man mystery is an unusual pretext to keep the characters together, but it works. The true aim of the film seems to be reconnecting a war-battered audience with its history and bucolic country landscapes. There's a bit of the mystical, with discussions of centuries past and the lingering ghosts of ancestors. The film also serves as a bit of American-British co-operation propaganda, in the form of Sweet's amiable Oregonian Bob. Sweet was an actual U. S. G. I. loaned to the film, an unprofessional actor, and it shows, but in a good way. His voice and personality may strike some the wrong way, but I found him charming. Both Sheila Sim and Dennis Price were also unknowns, and they both went on to fame, but Sweet became a school teacher. Recommended.