I think that over the course of the last quarter century Michael Powell (1905-90) has gone from being a nearly forgotten filmmaker to being an overrated one.

I don't know what of the 1940 "Thief of Baghdad" starring Sabu Powell was responsible for, and I haven't seen "One of Our Aircraft Is Missing" (1942). There are some striking shots, sequence, and dialogue in The 49th Parallel (1941), "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946), "The Red Shoes" (1948), and "Tales of Hoffman" (1951), though there are also expanses—particularly in "Hoffman" that I find very boring, and there is more than little in all of them that I find too schematic. I thought that "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" (1943) was too long and has been much overpraised (good as Deborah Kerr is in it) and, impressive as the color cinematography is in "Black Narcissus" is (and Kerr, and Sabu are), it is very overwrought, unbelievable, and tedious IMO. I loathe Peeping Tom (1960) and found "Ill-Me by Moonlight" (1957) very dull.

Criterion has given the full two-disc special treatment to the 1944 Archers' (Powell-Emeric Pressburger) "A Canterbury Tale," which was the first commercial and critical flop of their collaboration which ran from 1941-1957. I felt that I had to see it, but without soaring expectations.

I'll readily grant that the movie looks good. I think the visual compositions of Kent are mostly attributable to Powell (he was a native of Kent) and to cinematographer Erwin Hill (who would shoot Scotland and Wendy Hiller brilliantly for the Archers the following year for "I Know Where I'm Going!"). The Criterion images are exceptionally sharp.

The simplistic, contrived, and mystic plot I blame mostly on Pressburger (though Powell and Pressburger shared credits for producing, directing, and writing it).

First the simplistic: Most of the movie involves two sergeants, one British and one American, who are assigned to accompany a woman who has arrived on the same train at Chillingbourne, the stop before Canterbury (where the American was aimed, mistaking "Next stop Canterbury" for the stop). The woman has glue dumped in her hair by someone in a uniform. The three (and a band of young boys playing army) spend an inordinate amount of time solving the "mystery" of who the glue man is, although there is only one suspect.

Eventually (three-quarters of the way through the 2:04 running time), the three get to Canterbury. The last quarter of the movie is even more impressively photographed than the rest, including bombed-out blocks of Canterbury (a third of the city was leveled by German bombs) and the cathedral that was the destination of Chaucer's pilgrims (where Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas à Becket was slain by henchmen of Henry II). There are hokey "miracles" for all three there, complete with heavenly chorus (and a terrestrial one singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" on the eve of D-Day, I think). The three miracles seem very contrived to me, and I have an allergy to heavenly choruses employed in movies. And I am less than convinced by the sententious rationalization by the glue man (and the possible interpretation of a fourth miracle). There is something "Wizard of Oz"-like in the quest of one spunky young women and three incomplete men, though the stylization, songs, color, magic, and witches are not on the pilgrim's trail (a more mundane yellow-brick road, as it were).

The Chillingbourne scenes look very good, the Canterbury ones look great. I was surprised to learn that all but the first interior shot were filmed in the studio rather than in the cathedral, and duly impressed with the set designers' skills. And the bells pealing in the bell-tower were miniatures. The filmmakers were refused permission to film inside the cathedral.

I was considerably less impressed with the actors. As Alison Smith (the victim of "the glue man"), Sheila Sim (Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Magic Box) was the pick of the litter. Her part had the greatest emotional range and the opportunity to appear in a variety of costumes. Dennis Price (Kind Hearts and Coronets, I'm All Right, Jack, The Magic Box) as the British sergeant, Peter Gibbs, makes little impression.

Eric Portman (A veteran of the Archers' "49th Parallel" and "One of Our Plains is Missing" and who was also in "The Magic Box") makes an impression, a vaguely sinister one, as the magistrate (given the name of Renaissance Kent magus-of-sorts) Colpeper.

As the US Army sergeant Bob Johnson from Three Falls, Idaho, real-life Sgt. John Sweet initially irritated me as propaganda sweet-tempered American. He doesn't sound to me like he was from Idaho, but he also doesn't sound like he was from where he really was from: Minneapolis (just across the Mississippi from where I was born!). Although his character seems false in multiple ways to me, he has some doltish (naive?) charm.

Considering what a rhapsody to the Kent countryside it is, along with being a tribute to British pluck and a celebration of British eccentrics, I'm somewhat surprised that the movie failed in wartime Britain. The mystery is dull and the characters obviously propaganda models, and movies running more than two hours in those days were epics, but still...

For American release, Powell cut half an hour (which seems like a good idea to me). He also shot a framing story in which after the war, Bob Johnson wants to show the girlfriend who he has by then married (played by Kim Hunter, star of "A Matter of Life and Death") Canterbury Cathedral and the teashop where his own "miracle" occurred.

The Criterion release does not include the whole American version, but does have the beginning and the end with the married American sergeant telling his bride about what happened on his three-day leave in Kent, and an introduction that I find fairly amusing, replacing the one in Old English (Chaucer) with hokey medieval hunters and a falcon metamorphosing into an airplane. I'd think the 95-minute version must be less tedious than the 124 minute one.

The first disc was a dry commentary track that is very geography-heavy by Ian Christie along with the American beginning and ending.

A second disc that I have not seen includes a 20-minute interview of Sim, a short documentary about Sweet returning to Kent in 2001, a 24-minute documentary "The Canterbury Trail" focused on a 2005 expedition to show tourists where the movie was shot, the (18-minute) 1942 documentary "Listen to Britain" and a (7-minute) 2001 homage to it. Does a movie that is schematic and too long justify another whole disc of extras? As happy as I am to have Criterion making excellent prints of heretofore unavailable movies (or ones that had been transferred to VHS from degraded prints), I think that of late it/they have been producing too many releases with discs of bonus features!

©2006, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
Yes

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