341 A Canterbury Tale

[peerpee]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manc ... 495630.stm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[reno dakota]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manc ... 495630.stm

Well, at least it's easier to wash out of your hair (I imagine ).

[Napier]

What the hell does that link have to do with P & P films? Did I miss something?

[reno dakota]

What the hell does that link have to do with P & P films? Did I miss something?

Have you seen A Canterbury Tale? If so, and you don't see the connection:

SpoilerShow

Early in the film, an attaker throws glue at woman in the middle of the night. She spends some time trying to wash it out of her hair.

[Napier]

Thanks Reno Dakota. It's been so long since I've watched it, I totally forgot. I'm definitely due a P & P marathon.

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

I finally got around to this one in my runthrough of the P&P filmography. And what a film! Very undeservedly buried below their more critically hailed works. A really masterful flow from what appears to be a simple Hitchcock-like whodunnit to a more plotless metaphysical fare. I watched it in tandem with I Know Where I'm Going! which was fine, but maybe a bit too overwritten with an unnecessary, if inevitable, sweet ending that was a bit much for my taste. Some would say that applies to A Canterbury Tale as well, but I just found it to be so believable and natural, and I would even classify the final 40 minutes (from the hilltop scene when the film totally shifts gears) as an early example of transcendental cinema. It reminded me of how Dreyer executed the miracle in Ordet, and I'm sure he must have seen this film. I agree with other posts in this thread, yes, it is hard to describe exactly what makes this film so great, but then again isn't that the case with all masterpieces that touch the viewer on another level? I also agree that it has a certain Ozu-like vibe in some scenes, especially some of the stranger static shots like the one below, which made it a hypnotic experience. I have still to digest this film fully, but I have a feeling that it may end up being my favorite P&P film.

I have to say that my favorite sections have not been discussed in this thread yet; they are the brief scenes with zeppelins hovering in the air, and the actors only barely mentioning them. Of course, it would have seemed more natural back then but viewing it today I found it to be weirdly otherworldly. The first instance was this beautiful Ozu-like (complete with a passing train) static shot when Alison is visiting a one of the glue victims. At first I couldn't quite make out what it was, and it is not given attention at all:



Then, later, there's this shot that appears in my favorite section of the film when Alison is on the hilltop with Colpeper, and she has this magical vision of the past, just moments before the future is suddenly hovering over her head. Simply brilliant. Again, there's barely a mentioning of the zeppelins, although it later becomes obvious that Johnson and Gibbs climbed the hill to get a better view of the zeppelin, but they're not talking about them other than Johnson saying "cast your eye around that noble prospect". Maybe that's what makes this film so great, to me at least, that most things are happening between the spoken lines, and of course that it has so many unforgettable shots. Masterpiece!

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I think those are barrage balloons⁠—large unmanned balloons (meaning they could be filled with flammable hydrogen, which was very handy due to the scarcity of helium) tethered with steel cables intended to damage enemy bombers or force them to fly higher, where they would be more vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. In practice they lost most of their effectiveness once the Germans switched to high-level bombing, but they were still made and deployed well after (and managed to bring down some V-1 rockets late in the war). From the distances seen in the film, the cables were too thin to be register on camera, so they look more like free-floating zeppelins. You see the same illusion in some photos from the aftermath of D-Day, where the balloons were deployed by an all-Black unit.

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

I think those are barrage balloons⁠—large unmanned balloons (meaning they could be filled with flammable hydrogen, which was very handy due to the scarcity of helium) tethered with steel cables intended to damage enemy bombers or force them to fly higher, where they would be more vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. In practice they lost most of their effectiveness once the Germans switched to high-level bombing, but they were still made and deployed well after (and managed to bring down some V-1 rockets late in the war). From the distances seen in the film, the cables were too thin to be register on camera, so they look more like free-floating zeppelins. You see the same illusion in some photos from the aftermath of D-Day, where the balloons were deployed by an all-Black unit.

Thank you! Also a bit of an brainfart on my part as the zeppeliner was discontinued in 1940... And I guess you wouldn't have numerous of them floating over your head as in the second screenshot. That's what ecstasy from art does to me: make me ignorant.

[Mr Sausage]

DISCUSSION ENDS MONDAY, June 26th

Members have a two week period in which to discuss the film before it's moved to its dedicated thread in The Criterion Collection subforum. Please read the Rules and Procedures.

This thread is not spoiler free. This is a discussion thread; you should expect plot points of the individual films under discussion to be discussed openly. See: spoiler rules.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

I encourage members to submit questions, either those designed to elicit discussion and point out interesting things to keep an eye on, or just something you want answered. This will be extremely helpful in getting discussion started. Starting is always the hardest part, all the more so if it's unguided. Questions can be submitted to me via PM.

[therewillbeblus]

I wrote a little something a few years ago, which leads into where I’m at now with the film:

A Canterbury Tale: One of their best films yet one of the most difficult to describe what makes it work so well. The script is perfect, off and running from the first shot, and takes us on an adventure that’s as real as it is magical, with good natured people and the external mystery element provides a comfortable and exciting path to the internal adventure and subsequent discovery each character makes with the aid of the others, solicited or unsolicited. There’s a middle setpiece where the children of the town engage in an extensive game of war with some adult participation from Bob that always makes me smile in its playfulness, innocence, and overall positivity. A lot has been said about the ending, which is great - especially the pan up to the chapel ceiling, but for me this is the scene that first allows this film to achieve its greatness. The Archers are never afraid to halt the drama of their worlds to practice mindfulness, giving space to a beautiful moment and allowing it to extend for as long as necessary, venturing into sentimentality with enough invisible restraint to stop their work from becoming cliche. For them, the world seems to stop for these moments and film is the way to capture their power.

I fall deeper in love with this film every viewing because of its (seemingly alien yet incredibly corporeal and honest) balance of maturity and a sense of play. The adults in the film behave like adults - they have real problems, take their responsibilities seriously, have and act upon strong moral codes - and yet they also aren’t ‘above’ engaging with the world through a child’s eye view: appreciating the mystery, the adventure, prioritizing (and at base, noticing) opportunities for camaraderie and ‘letting go’. Or, in other words, they can access the spiritual outlet a kid does -the kind that many adults lose with accumulated age, exhaustion, traumas, etc. This film would make an interesting double feature with Licorice Pizza, a film that spends its runtime detailing youthful yearning for adulthood -contending with adults who have sacrificed their peripheral appreciation of life as they (perhaps irreversibly) descended into the narcissism of ‘self’- without accepting that sense of play that defines a predominant part of them. That film shows us a journey towards accepting ourselves as a mix, abandoning the fight with ourselves to achieve some binary absolutist fantasy of what it means to be a self-actualized person. That struggle is real for youth to figure out, but P&P show a world where both ends and the spectrum in between are possible and necessary to truly ‘live’. And then they make it look so seamless that I’m reminded of all the self-constructed barriers i and we create to prevent accessing that space every viewing. I feel like their worldview yields a similar ending to PTA’s film, only it just wears it in its DNA: life can be a lot simpler than we make it. And when we keep it simple and shed the noise we concoct and make real, obfuscating our vision from ubiquitous spiritual energy, we can have clarity.

I have no idea how they craft this balance so consistently into the fabric of the film, but it helps that we drop in at the start of an adventure that resembles a child’s game or storybook - a silly mystery that prompts the forming of a club who stick together to get to their own mini-catharses. And in the process they wield mature impulses, admire their surroundings, ask questions, listen with curiosity and connect to their milieu, and play. They play as adults and as children. They transcend age because they can access the child and adult inside them. And nobody pretends to have all the answers - even the head of the community is resorting to ridiculous, crude action to try to control something overwhelming and ungraspable. But what matters is that he owns it when it’s time, yet never apologized for his morals behind the behavior. The adult and the child together, unapologetically owning both sections of the self

[knives]

When I first watched this it struck me as an enjoyable, but completely minor Archer effort. This rewatch doesn’t completely remove that feeling, but a fun romp in the countryside as envisioned by this pair is better than a lot of great movies. In particular I loved the connections it breeds with the later A Matter of Life and Death bridging the ocean of difference to create this sense of Anglo-familiarity through absurd quirk.

[Jonathan S]

I first saw this in 1978, which I believe was the first BBC (possibly UK) broadcast. I've always found it interesting (more so on several subsequent viewings) yet still a bit baffling and frustrating. It's obviously structured around contrasts (old/new, English/American, country/city, mysticism/materialism) and I think the "Glueman" - besides his literal activity of glue-pouring - is meant to be the adhesive that binds together the rather thin threads of narrative. But his character is never really explored or developed and at times he just feels like a spokesperson. To what extent are his views meant to be taken at face value (he makes anti-cinema remarks after all!)?

Hitchcock would surely have found a lot of Freudian fun with the Glueman's misogynistic perversion - which today (perhaps more than then) would be a serious crime - but he "explains" it in a nonchalant, evasive manner, almost like a public service announcement, and P&P more or less leave it at that, or at worst a harmless eccentricity. I suppose magistrates were then seen to be above the law!

Looking at it outside the P&P canon, it stands somewhere between a simpler celebration of English countryside like Tawny Pipit and Priestley/Dearden's schematic think-piece They Came to a City (both 1944). More subtly if less coherently than the latter, P&P's film also seems - after nearly five years of war - to be trying to steer a path between progressive and traditional values (which is of course also a theme that runs through other Powell films like Blimp).

[Sloper]

I loved re-visiting this – it didn’t really ‘chime’ with me when I first saw it, and I think I shared some of Jonathan S’s confusion about (or frustration with) the resolution of the Glue Man plot. This time, somehow, it all clicked. I watched it in the middle of an extremely difficult, stressful week, and found it very moving and sort of comforting.

TWBB’s post goes some way to explaining how I feel about the film. It has to do with taking the time to ‘notice’ things, to acknowledge aspects of the world and ourselves and other people that might normally go un-noticed. This reflects the ethos of The Canterbury Tales, which (as I see it) makes the case that all perspectives and all ways of experiencing life are significant and worthy of attention. It isn’t straightforwardly egalitarian, but any hierarchy we impose on the tales and their tellers is open to question. Perhaps this has some bearing on the discussion of the film’s perceived ‘conservative’ values in the original thread (
starting here).

Like other P&P films – especially my favourite, Colonel Blimp – this one has a wonderful sense of ‘leisure’ about it. As TWBB says, play is very important in the film, but so is rambling around doing nothing in particular, or just sitting in silence as the characters do on the train (and not just when going through the tunnel). I don’t consciously practise mindfulness but I do know this feeling of just ‘being’ in a place, or on a journey, or with a person, and embracing a lack of purpose.

I mentioned that for me this was a respite from a difficult week, and from problems that are ultimately very low-stakes. A Canterbury Tale belongs to a fascinating sub-genre of war films that focus on life back at home: the others that come to mind are Mrs Miniver, The Way to the Stars, and The Best Years of Our Lives, all of which share that spirit of looking at the seemingly insignificant and saying ‘this matters too’. It’s like Bob marvelling at Canterbury Cathedral and thinking back to the far ‘smaller’ achievements of his own ancestors back in America – he says something like ‘that was a pretty good job of work too’. It’s not a protest against the monumental structure before him, but a complementary reflection that feels exactly ‘right’ in this moment.

When people talk about having a sense of perspective, they usually mean recognising that our present troubles don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But in these films, the grand scheme of the war throws the importance of smaller things into relief. This could so easily be corny – the mawkish flipside of the ‘keep calm and carry on’ stiff-upper-lip mentality – but all four of these films do a wonderful job of paying attention to the characters’ feelings, and taking seriously their investment in the minutiae of their lives, while also showing the pressures (and even the need for repression) exerted by the war. I find it hard to say what I mean here. There’s some kind of balancing-act at work, and I’m not sure how it works, but it makes me feel something far more intense and profound than most war films do.

Maybe the best illustration of how this film ‘notices’ things is the effortless way in which it makes the characters – all of them – so likeable. Powell and Pressburger are famous for creating quirky, eccentric characters, and for me the important thing is that we’re made to like these people for what they are; we want them to be happy, but we don’t want them to change. I Know Where I’m Going, for instance, appears to be a classic tale of someone who needs to ‘change their ways’, but it’s really about someone embracing who they are, and the Joan in the final scene seems just like the one we fell in love with at the start.

The people in A Canterbury Tale feel unique, unlike any other fictional characters I’ve seen, even though superficially they might resemble ‘types’ (the plucky land girl, the cheerful GI, the tight-lipped British soldier). Their patterns of speech and facial expressions, and the ways in which they respond to their surroundings or to the events and revelations of the story, are all their own and not easy to pin down. The camera seems to have the same attitude to them as it does to the countryside, or the cathedral, or the bombed-out ruins in Canterbury: it’s all interesting, and not for any straightforward reason.

And somehow, in a way I also can't explain (but maybe I'll try in a day or two), this all adds up to make sense of the Glue Man plot, or to 'not make sense' of it in a way that feels just right. More than on my first viewing, I was struck by how much the film doesn't simply endorse Colpeper's actions or perspective, and how much these are challenged by the three protagonists. Why they don't turn him in at the end is not easy to say, but it's not because he was simply 'right'. I think it's tied up in how the characters feel about their experience in Chillingbourne and Canterbury (including the glue, and Colpeper, and everything), and how they locate this within the larger context of the war. Perhaps the ending works or doesn't work for the viewer depending on whether those feelings resonate with them, as they didn't with me on my previous viewing.

[therewillbeblus]

Great thoughts, Sloper. I love how it’s not overstated “why” the characters don’t turn Colpeper in, because, by not reducing it to a simple collective answer, their response of inaction recognizes that they can and do have their own personal reasons for not turning him in - rather than a collective, conscious and unified moral, thereby validating their individuality orbiting around some kind of empathy or ‘letting go’ mindfulness.

I think some of it plays into the kind of perspective you’re talking about, affirming that he’s got his reasons for doing this that they can’t possibly conceive - or rather, the motivation behind it is something they cannot possibly know. Just like nobody can know what it’s like for Bob to feel ghosted by his girlfriend (broadly relate, sure, but nobody knows their rich history and all the specifics but him and her) or Alison’s fear that her partner is dead (again, other people in wartime know what it’s like to lose loved ones, but their relationship, like any, is sacred and special and unlike any other), Colpeper has his own story and relationship with his people, his perceived role and responsibility in helping them, etc. This isn’t a film where characters receive comfort by others telling them they ‘know’ the other’s experiences inside out, and band together around some superficial common denominator of suffering. It’s a film where people connect through empathy and willingness to indulge perspective. Validation but not necessarily endorsement.

So the three people don’t know what it’s like for Colpeper to feel responsible and powerless in this community, and to rationalize sacrificing certain morals for a higher moral, but they listen and ultimately allow themselves to challenge and pass some judgment and also not play God over his experience in his social context. They see the morality sparking his actions, and can broadly relate to the sense powerlessness and desire to help others, but mostly I think they just humble themselves from inserting their wills into that context, once explained, They collectively see an equal human being sitting across from them. Before that, while still invisible and defined by assaultive behavior, it was easy to dehumanize the culprit. But now, they see the humanity. Perhaps they’re ‘staying in their lane’ to harness their finite energy towards their own troubles, or perhaps they’re “letting go and let God” in a spiritual way. Perhaps they feel sorry for a man who presents as myopic, who is confident about his intervention and unwilling to look at other perspectives, when they themselves encourage this process, and have benefited from them so much just within the short journey that we’ve witnessed. Perhaps they feel a commonality with him - knowing (or, rather, having faith) that he must have exhausted these skills at taking perspective and engaging in non-harmful intervention before committing to what he’s doing now.

They do play a role in the final exchange that’s worth naming, and that you touched on: they speak their piece and pronounce their own perspectives and morals. They allow themselves to engage with him around his behavior to an extent. But then, when the train ride is over, they go their separate ways. Isn’t that the best we can do in this life? Nobody can just enter another person’s mind and change it, walk over and move their body differently, go back in time to change their conditioning and teachings. So many people today exhaust themselves by wielding that part of them that wants to control another’s political beliefs, or affection for them, or general perspective to see it their way, over and over into a void, but it’s futile. We can and all benefit from challenges from objective parties, for in a vacuum we fester with our thoughts and don’t learn, grow, notice things we’re doing that we should probably change. That’s why partners, friends, therapists exist. But one’s partner or friend or therapist is not responsible for co-regulating them all the time forever. The best we can do is provide an objective perspective and trust or hope the person is willing to take it in, based on our own experiences of benefiting from the same process.

So these people say their piece, pass their judgments on in a constructive and compassionate but firm way, and then disengage - allowing Colpeper to do his own work in this area. They do engage, but they are aware of their respective loci of control. Faith is a big theme in P&P’s work - the fear around parting from a sense of obsessive control but the necessity in having faith to truly join intimately with others and our world. These people choose to have faith that God will take care of Colpeper, or perhaps in Colpeper to take in their perspectives to some degree. It’s not up to them to decide, they have no concrete expectations (for if they did, they’d surely be with him still, chaperoning him to meet the consequences they have imposed upon him) but rather ‘broad’ expectations that if they participate in life and are honest with themselves and others, they’ve done their duty. It’s a very therapeutically appropriate, self-preserving, and externally validating and humanistic approach. It’s also one that’s deeply spiritual. They don’t necessarily feel ‘better’ than Colpeper - and in detaching from his own work here, they implicitly acknowledge that. But they are confident in their own growth, perspectives, and will dutifully contribute that to the conversation. It’s what they feel their responsibility is in the situation. No more, no less.

[Jonathan S]

I suppose my general resistance to anything spiritual and especially religious impedes my enjoyment of this film. Certainly, I find the Canterbury Cathedral “Onward Christian Soldiers” finale depressing and chilling because it reminds me of a passage in the autobiography of my father who was “marching off to war” as an eighteen-year-old army recruit in the summer of 1944 when the film was on general release. He later wrote that in Normandy thousands of them were made to sing this hymn during “a ‘church’ service, when the chaplain blessed us and called on God’s help in the task that lay ahead, when we would be going forward to kill as many fellow human-beings as possible.” The war didn’t last long for my dad as he lost both legs in combat in August 1944, though he spent the next 55 years living with his injuries.

In the context of all the bloodshed in that war, it is of course arguable that “the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans” (to quote from another film) – not even the victims of the glueman. The film keeps asserting that Colpepper’s crime is trivial through such devices as its repetitive comical rum-ti-tum music theme and dismissive lines like farmer Pru’s, “It’s happened to other girls – none of ‘em died.” Sticky as the glue may be, landgirl Alison finds it even harder to wash that man right out of her hair. I mean Colpepper (as well as her presumed dead fiancé) whom, like her two companions, she still respects in spite of his crime, though I don’t think that this amounts to much more than a warming over of the old Christian chestnut of “love the sinner, hate the sin.” And I do think this is an essentially Christian film, as in its repeated implication that a church organ is in every sense loftier than a cinema one.

It's interesting to compare it with Went the Day Well? (1942), a far “tougher” account of wartime English village life in which the local leader also turns out to be villainous. But unlike the quisling squire of Cavalcanti’s thriller, Colpepper’s relatively minor crime is committed against the side he supports, albeit for a supposedly honourable motive. Perhaps P&P are addressing - as in the "total war" of Blimp - not only the commonplace wartime theme of sacrifice but also asking us to consider the position of Allied leaders who had to make morally wrong yet pragmatically correct decisions, such as the bombing of Hamburg or (later) Hiroshima.

However, my real problem with it isn’t so much the treatment of Colpepper’s crime but that I don’t find him at all credible as a character. Portman is after all top-billed – literally the name above the title – and, though he possesses the commanding authority typical of English actors in this period, I don’t find him a very sensitive or nuanced actor. He’s no Laughton. The script doesn’t help him because Colpepper, though he constantly expounds opinions, has virtually no backstory or psychological complexity. The only way that I can make sense of his central presence is that he isn’t meant to be a realistic character at all, but only a catalyst for the changes in others. At several moments, he makes sudden and sinister appearances that even suggest he’s an imaginary figure, a precursor of Conductor 71 in A Matter of Life and Death. When Colpepper is silhouetted by the beam of the magic lantern during his lecture, he appears like a phantasmagorical projection.

I suppose this is one of those films, like Citizen Kane or L'Avventura, that sets up a mystery or gimmick that’s gradually abandoned or pushed into the background for more important matters. Superficially, the plot element resembles, say, Hitchcock’s Young and Innocent in which two men and a woman play detectives in tracking down a criminal. But crucially there’s no “wrong man” here, nor indeed any compelling mystery as no other suspects are presented. I’d be curious to see if Powell’s shortened and re-ordered American cut emphasises this plot element, though that’s clearly not what mainly interested him.
For all the film’s mystical qualities, its debt to the British documentary movement, such as the wartime films of Humphrey Jennings, seems to me equally important, including the use of non-professional actors in minor roles and of course John Sweet’s major one of the American sergeant. That’s one of several elements to which I respond positively – and I’m always moved to tears by the cobwebbed caravan sequence which reveals Alison as a potential Miss Havisham – but ultimately it’s a film (like, say, The Searchers) where my enjoyment mainly derives from wrestling with it.

[barbarella satyricon]

I happened to watch this for the first time a few months ago, and though I'm probably not recalling all the details correctly from that late-night, work-night viewing, Jonathan S's thoughts on Colpeper resonate with my own impression of the character, though perhaps in a way that finds him to be a thematically and dramatically coherent part of the film's pervasive and elusive atmosphere of magic, of a very busy metaphysics behind the curtain of its real-world backdrop.

Simply put, my sense by the film's end was that Colpeper had been effectively shut out of the threefold "miracle(s)" of the other central characters, and also, by extension, from whatever other granting or manifestation of "wishes" that may have visited the community of pilgrims congregated. It is a curiously charged image of vexation and of more than a little bitter, badly chastened self-reflection that I recall as the near-final (penultimate?) shot of the film, of Alison being guided by her boyfriend's father into the inner area of the cathedral (symbolic sanctum, if you will), and Colpeper, not even noticed by the two, left on the outside, seemingly frozen in the moment, looking, to my mind, like a figure in frieze, set in a rigid depiction, almost as in a scene of judgment.

It's also his seemingly pleased (hopeful, encouraged) reaction to Alison's distraught emotions upon finding the dust-covered, moth-beset condition of her caravan that I recall in relation to his later, final disappointment. Her quickly dashed romantic dreams and hopes (as misguided as they may have been) signal an advance in his own designs, and in retrospect, then, he positions himself (though unknowingly, without any necessary malice) in the way of some other completely unexpected turn of events that will be coming her way presently.

Unrelated to the topic of Colpeper, but just an aside on the value of watching certain films with as little foreknowledge as possible, when Alison learns that her boyfriend is alive, her dizzy, fainting POV shot was fantastically vivid to me in the moment, and I was glad that apart from something about glue being in hair, I didn't know anything else about the film's plot, and nothing of the individual miracles/blessings that visit the characters at the end.

Jonathan S's comments about Colpeper as a character who "constantly expounds opinions" illuminate what I sensed as the film's unprojected, imperceptibly woven-in "lesson" or even, again, judgment. Within whatever logic, rules, or presuppositions that dictate the operation of "magic" on the Pilgrims' Way, Colpeper is not on that road. He may pontificate and moralize in some right-seeming direction, but he's also a ways off course. And in his glue-pouring shenanigans, his role as a frustrator, an impinger, is underlined, and his existence, as the film depicts and outlines in seemingly meandering scene to leisurely scene, is also that of a frustrated one.

A frustrated man who also frustrates – that might be coming down a little too hard, and maybe it's even just wrong, based on details I may be forgetting, others I'm misremembering, but in a quick online search of plot details and of various interpretations, there seem to be such divergent readings of the Colpeper character that I'll just go with the one that was my gut instinct on a very enjoyably invested first viewing.

Again, not knowing at all where the story was headed really did enhance my enjoyment of and involvement in this one, and my final read on Colpeper, while feeling subjectively certain, thematically coherent, is also open to revision, added nuance, because it really did seem as though, all along, that he was the main protagonist to get behind, the old romantic underdog scholar that we (just me?) would most like to see have his ship come in.

[Sloper]

Jonathan S, I really appreciated reading your reaction to the film, and I sympathise with a lot of what you say. Despite my love for the films I mentioned above, I can’t help being uncomfortable with their propagandist elements, and the ways in which they try to make the horrors of war palatable to the audience. Michael Redgrave’s poems in The Way to the Stars are very moving from one point of view, but insidiously manipulative from another, and as you say this is something a viewer has to ‘wrestle with’.

I would push back on a couple of points, however:

I suppose my general resistance to anything spiritual and especially religious impedes my enjoyment of this film [...] I don’t think that this amounts to much more than a warming over of the old Christian chestnut of “love the sinner, hate the sin.” And I do think this is an essentially Christian film, as in its repeated implication that a church organ is in every sense loftier than a cinema one.

I’m not at all religious and have no sense of spirituality, though I quite like engaging with religious texts and films – however, this didn’t really strike me as a Christian film, and I don’t see the message as ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’, even if it was intended that way.

TWBB’s reading of the film resonates with me in some ways, but I think I’m coming at this from a different angle. For me, the film is not particularly interested in love or even empathy. I like the fact that the characters don’t fall in love with each other (except maybe Colpeper with Alison, see below) or even become close friends. There’s a sense that this whole experience is a kind of interlude in their lives, a brief encounter with something far stranger and more mysterious than romantic or Christian love, or empathy, or understanding.

When you say that you find the ‘onward Christian soldiers’ ending chilling, I agree, and indeed I think there is something gently disturbing about the whole film. The cathedral is kind of elemental and uncanny, as is the countryside around Chillingbourne where you can hear echoes from the past around every corner. It’s not quite at the level of uncanny horror you find in, say, a David Lynch film, but there is something of that chilling encounter with the abyss in Powell & Pressburger’s films.

The most obvious example is Black Narcissus, but even in a film as good-natured as Colonel Blimp there is a sense of strange forces at work, not necessarily good or evil but just ‘there’, an aspect of how we experience the universe. There are good reasons to be judgemental about Clive’s naive sense of honour, about Theo’s cynicism, and about the new generation’s cold-blooded pragmatism, and we see the characters judging each other for these attitudes – and we also understand that each attitude has consequences, some good and some devastatingly bad. But the film itself isn’t interested in judging these attitudes, it just portrays them for what they are, invites us to acknowledge and accept them, and leaves us with a sense that they co-exist more or less awkwardly in a world that perhaps cannot be understood or judged in any definitive way.

The same applies to Sister Clodagh’s and Sister Ruth’s behaviour in Black Narcissus: depending on your perspective, you can judge either or both of these characters in different ways (as they judge each other), but when I watch that film I just feel like I’m ‘there’ with them, facing the realisation that these are things that happen in this world, like the torrential rain that falls at the end. Morality, faith, any kind of order or intentions that people might have – all that stuff seems irrelevant after staring over that beautiful, terrifying cliff edge. When I see Sister Ruth come through the doorway at the end, I don’t feel like I’m looking at someone I should be judging, or loving, or empathising with, or even at someone suffering from mental illness who needs treatment. I don’t know how to describe what the film shows me in that moment, except that it feels very ‘real’ and fills me with an entirely non-moral, non-spiritual sense of terror and awe.

A Canterbury Tale is clearly much less dramatic and extreme, but I think that deep down it has a similar attitude to the people and the phenomena it portrays. As I said in my previous post, on this second viewing it seemed very clear that there were strong grounds for judging and condemning Colpeper’s criminal behaviour, misogyny, paternalism, etc. – but the film also acknowledges that there are other perspectives that are perhaps not concerned with the ‘rightness’ of his behaviour, and that see him in a different context. This kind of non-moral attitude is itself open to criticism, as a kind of moral cop-out, a failure to condemn things that should be condemned. Perhaps as well as being a non-spiritual and non-religious person, I also tend to have a rather non-moral point of view about life, and that’s why I read it in this way.

But for instance, I don’t quite agree that the film implies ‘a church organ is in every sense loftier than a cinema one’, any more than it implies Canterbury Cathedral is superior to the small church built by Sergeant Johnson’s ancestor. We might expect the church organist to look down his nose at the cinema organist, but instead he recalls being a circus organist himself, and speculates about the relative value of their salaries. When he offers Gibbs the chance to play the church organ, he is allowing him to fulfil a long-held ambition, and there is a sense that this is a ‘blessing’ and a great experience for Gibbs; but it also suggests a continuity between the organ-playing that goes on in circuses, cinemas, and cathedrals, under-cutting Colpeper’s remark about the ‘man who learns to play Bach and ends up playing popular music’ vs. the ‘man who learns to walk step by step and climbs Mount Everest’. Gibbs is both of these men – he’s a cinema organist who ends up on the mountain peak – and the film invites us to deconstruct our judgements about the relative worth of these identities or activities. That goes hand in hand with its failure to judge Colpeper himself.

However, my real problem with it isn’t so much the treatment of Colpepper’s crime but that I don’t find him at all credible as a character. Portman is after all top-billed – literally the name above the title – and, though he possesses the commanding authority typical of English actors in this period, I don’t find him a very sensitive or nuanced actor. He’s no Laughton.

Well I love Charles Laughton so I won’t argue with that, but I do also have a soft spot for Eric Portman. This probably stems from frequent re-viewings of The Prisoner and The Bedford Incident when I was a teenager. Neither of those roles are particularly ‘English’, to me; in the latter he’s German, and in the former he’s working for an organisation with no specified nationality. He’s good at playing a morally ambivalent or inaccessible authority figure (see also 49th Parallel and Corridor of Mirrors) thanks in part to his clipped, repressed, remote speech patterns. Without subtitles and/or a clean soundtrack, it’s often hard to decipher what he’s saying, because he has a way of swallowing his words – a kind of ‘burbling’ that is often associated with the repression of the British upper-class, but that has a subtly different resonance with Portman. It works in The Prisoner as a complement to Patrick McGoohan’s (differently) inscrutable performance, and in The Bedford Incident as a complement to Richard Widmark’s and Sidney Poitier’s more demonstrative acting.

Portman’s effectiveness can be summed up by two moments in the latter film, which I’ll describe without spoiling the plot. First, when he confronts Widmark near the end and says, ‘No, captain – to be frank, I consider you frightening’; and then soon afterwards, in his final appearance, when he just looks at Widmark and walks away. In the first moment, we’re amazed that this ice-cold former U-boat commander, who seems so utterly checked out from reality, could be frightened by anything. In the second moment, he seems more checked-out than ever, while somehow conveying (with that look) a sense of deep and intense emotion. Without this performance, the film would not be nearly as impactful or disturbing.

I know what you mean when you say Portman is not a sensitive or nuanced actor, and I can see how he would come across as wooden to some viewers. But to me, he’s one of those actors who can appear to be doing almost literally nothing, and yet give me that sense of awe and terror I was talking about before. Something is happening beneath that impenetrable surface and those impenetrable line-readings, and I find it compulsively watchable. (Still would have been great to see Laughton in this role, though.)

Simply put, my sense by the film's end was that Colpeper had been effectively shut out of the threefold "miracle(s)" of the other central characters, and also, by extension, from whatever other granting or manifestation of "wishes" that may have visited the community of pilgrims congregated. It is a curiously charged image of vexation and of more than a little bitter, badly chastened self-reflection that I recall as the near-final (penultimate?) shot of the film, of Alison being guided by her boyfriend's father into the inner area of the cathedral (symbolic sanctum, if you will), and Colpeper, not even noticed by the two, left on the outside, seemingly frozen in the moment, looking, to my mind, like a figure in frieze, set in a rigid depiction, almost as in a scene of judgment.

I read this the same way as you, although I don’t see vexation or bitterness in his reaction to Alison walking past. In fact, I think this moment is a weird kind of vindication for Colpeper. He said that pilgrims go to Canterbury for blessings or for penance: sure enough, the other three characters get their blessings, and he humbly closes his eyes and accepts his penance. It’s almost as if he has engineered this situation towards this conclusion in order to prove a point.

[HinkyDinkyTruesmith]

I’ve really enjoyed reading over all the thoughtful discussion about this film. I don’t agree with much of what I’ve read — I don’t even much like Eric Portman personally but I find him a very solid actor, and I’ve always found his Colpeper psychologically credible — but it’s always been a pleasure.

I mean, Colpeper is a Luddite, and this is a film fixed at the point of great flux. He looks backwards, to the Roman coins, to a time when soldiers came to his lectures, to when land girls weren’t thrown on him to help. He’s neurotic in the way of sexuality — living with his mother as a bachelor at an advanced age — even if he isn’t outright gay or outright sexually perverse. I think often of the single, quiet but pointed, rebuttal that is given little time but great punctuation by a close-up as an alternative to his Glueman solution for getting soldiers coming to his lectures. “Didn’t it ever occur to you to invite the girls to your lectures?” “No.” “Pity.”

Alison Smith is, after all, the actual motor of the film’s plot — and probably mostly so because Colpeper won’t employ her time otherwise as a land girl. The other victims of the Glueman don’t care enough, it seems, to inquire after the incidents — but Alison, who not only is attacked by Colpeper but whose services are declined because she is a girl, is too ambitious and too vexed to let it go. She’s the one who rallies the troops as it were, and is a clear image of the wartime woman empowered by the vacuum left by the missing soldiers, like her boyfriend. Her “pity” is so knowing, so assured — she knows that women can do as well as men, that women would be interested in the lectures. Alas! (She is, truly, one of my favorite characters in cinema, and despite being a fairly unused actress, there are few line readings in cinema as haunting to me as Sheila Sim’s whispered, delayed “Why?” to the question of why the mechanic was looking to get in touch with her, as if afraid of frightening away the good news she senses is coming, the miracle.)

So for me the film is fixed on the fact that the war has changed — everything! Most homefront propaganda films are “why we fight” films — the extol the virtues of the world that needs protecting. But this is an odd film, clearly made after the turning point of the war. The eagerness of supporting the war effort of even Blimp has calmed, and they are looking to other things in the world now. Now, it’s about finishing the job of the war, surviving it, fulfilling our own private lives. It’s a slow quiet transition. This is less a why we fight film than, what do we do now with what we’ve fought for? What did we fight for? Characters are thrown into new spaces, new opportunities. And Colpeper, a conservative, is disturbed by this. The sexual freedom incurred by the war, the shifting values — after all, Alison may be the only woman of the main quartet, but Colpeper is clearly the only settled adult.

I’ve been wrestling with this movie for years and frankly I still haven’t finished my wrestling. Its beauty for me is in its quiet sentiments, its melancholy, but also in the feeling I get from it that I really can’t compare with much else, except maybe Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, that sense of a work of art that truly understandings and replicates the beauty of nature and the natural world and our place in it. I continue to be invested in the conversations, memories, debates the characters have and am drawn so very much to the beautifully shot village and countryside of mid century Kent. It’s a bit of British fetishism for myself (I love pre-war Hitchcock for example for much the same reason), but what can you do? I also must say that the Glueman stuff works for me, because it’s a strange, uncanny little mystery that is a highly structured genre plot that folds out into a sprawling pastoral poem; I love amateur detectives, especially when they’re women; and I love all the character actors and and always moved by Alison’s walk through the bombed out streets of Canterbury — a literal document of a real life miracle — that through the Nazi blitz, the cathedral has managed to stand upright and undestroyed — and a reminder of all the loss and the horror that has even managed, like the tank that opens the film, to find its way into this unassuming part of the world. These thoughts are scattered, but it has been a moment since I’ve seen the film, and I find myself hard pressed to talk about it in any definitive way just as I find it difficult to talk about the feeling of grass beneath my hands or the wind through the trees or the sense of being somewhere where people have been passing for thousands of years doing exactly as I have done.

[therewillbeblus]

Wonderful appreciation, I loved reading that

[barbarella satyricon]

In fact, I think this moment is a weird kind of vindication for Colpeper. He said that pilgrims go to Canterbury for blessings or for penance: sure enough, the other three characters get their blessings, and he humbly closes his eyes and accepts his penance.

Well, that hits it square on the head for me. Thanks for recalling that detail about blessings and penances. Posting earlier, I knew that I would most likely agree with whatever qualification or pushback that my reading might invite, as I seem to have consciously overstated certain impressions (e.g. the film's "judgment" of Colpeper) in trying to convey the charged atmosphere of sudden change and reversals that the film gallops to an end on, one that left an unshakable and unplaceable sense of both exultation and troubling gravity for me.

The image of Alison being led by Geoffrey's father also isn't one of celebration or joy. Rather, I sensed solemnity to be the mood of the entire shot, and graveness. And though I'm now subjectively reading into and extrapolating from an otherwise neutral image (one recalled imperfectly in my mind), the shot also seems to be signaling the end of youth – of caravans and countryside capering – and anticipating Alison being led to the altar of marriage, her destiny sealed (as happy and desirable as that destiny may be) in the moment she has learned of Geoffrey being alive, of his father's change of heart concerning their union.

...there are few line readings in cinema as haunting to me as Sheila Sim’s whispered, delayed “Why?” to the question of why the mechanic was looking to get in touch with her, as if afraid of frightening away the good news she senses is coming, the miracle.

Yes, and that's a great evocation of the moment. The extra beat or two in the shot and the drawn-out reaction and line reading make for an enthralling effect, one that really got its vicarious hooks into me. Off the top of my head, I can't recall ever feeling so fullheartedly happy for a fictional film character. And not to go all fanfic on A Canterbury Tale, but what a great story Alison and Geoffrey will be able to tell their children and grandchildren. (There is no heart emoji on this post editor by which I may effectively end this paragraph.)

We might expect the church organist to look down his nose at the cinema organist, but instead he recalls being a circus organist himself, and speculates about the relative value of their salaries. When he offers Gibbs the chance to play the church organ, he is allowing him to fulfil a long-held ambition, and there is a sense that this is a ‘blessing’ and a great experience for Gibbs; but it also suggests a continuity between the organ-playing that goes on in circuses, cinemas, and cathedrals, under-cutting Colpeper’s remark about the ‘man who learns to play Bach and ends up playing popular music’ vs. the ‘man who learns to walk step by step and climbs Mount Everest’. Gibbs is both of these men – he’s a cinema organist who ends up on the mountain peak – and the film invites us to deconstruct our judgements about the relative worth of these identities or activities.

So many great points to respond to, in your post and in others' here, Sloper, but it was the character of Gibbs who was most strongly on my mind after first posting about Colpeper. Your description of the church organist brings back the gratifying impression that I had of the character, of the small but indispensable role that he plays, and the seemingly nonchalant way (almost as if appointed by some other compelling power or mysterious incidental convergences) that he just settles into an easy, unobtrusive rapport with Gibbs.

Early on, I found Gibbs to be mostly brittle and defensive, particularly in his armchair bull session with Colpeper, but you are right to say that the film doesn't make any value judgments about whatever professional choices he has made, or about his seemingly too tightly constructed defense regarding same. The moment at the church organ is not played up as any kind of prodigal's homecoming and redemption, thankfully. More than anything, it was, again, the almost clockwork rapport between the older and the younger professional that I found unexpectedly moving. The one gives the cue, and then the other's training just kicks in, as it was always meant to do.

It's supposed to be a happy movie moment in any case, but the delicacy and the definiteness of some rarefied emotional experience and edification there, conveyed by the image in some other mysterious working of, uh, what is it, film art? I found it even put a little catch in my throat.

[barbarella satyricon]

Reflecting on why I may have found the scene of Alison's "miracle" at the mechanic's as powerfully effective as I did, I thought that it must be the consciously or unconsciously registered weight of history behind it. That is, and hopefully not to sound all sententious about it, that there were stories of Alisons and Geoffreys all throughout and after the war, and many more with endings and outcomes not nearly as happy, far, far from it.

And I made the "fanfic" joke in the previous post, but it then occurred to me that Geoffrey could very likely have been found maimed or at the very least injured – that this was not just a possibility, but a terribly probable reality. I wonder if, included in all the inexplicable undercurrents that this film seems to be elusively signaling us to, that that may be just one more unseen, untouched thread that casts some indefinable pall over what would seem to be a most happy ending.

I knew the film was something of a great one as soon as I was done watching it, but the discussion here highlighted for me just what an inexhaustively rich and complex text it really might be. I didn't know film club discussions were appended to main film threads afterwards, so thanks for the chance to belatedly add this post, and if I can use this space to say it, thanks again to Mr. Sausage and swo for the film club years.