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You know, no matter how much you love a filmmaker there will inevitably come a time when you watch one of their movies and think, “Well, you can’t hit them all out of the ballpark.” Behold, Michael Powell and A Canterbury Tale, a slight film that is overly long and frightfully dull, but it does possess some lovely scenery and early glimpses of the genius that would be displayed in Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.
You see, this film vaguely takes the notion of Chaucer’s infamous story and reconstitutes it as a parable in WWII. The film is pure propaganda made to remind the British forces and citizens what it was exactly that they were fighting to protect. It utilizes a lot of first time actors like Sheila Sim and John Sweet, and they’re awkward, mumbling, shrill and pretty terrible in their parts. Sweet seems to be overdoing his lines while Sim is often nervously rushing through. Using an American to explain pastoral England and why it’s worth loving isn’t a bad idea – seeing the familiar through fresh eyes and all that – but it’s also not terribly interesting in how it’s presented. Lots of scenes that go nowhere and padded moments that don’t bother with the main “plot” only make the situation worse. By the time we get to the cathedral in Canterbury, I had mentally checked out of the film just hoping it was all going to be over soon.
While it is tedious to sit through, there are many glorious sights to behold. The opening trick shot of a hawk transforming into an airplane is one. Powell & Pressburger would go on to create more stunning visual tricks and images in their later films, but this one is still a nice little bit of magic. And Kent is a positively lovely space to take in. I understand why they would film so many scenes with locals improvising daily routines because the location is just stunning. In the end, this is what the film is about and maybe it would have been better spent with minimal dialogue and doing something Terrence Malick-like before he even began to compose his symphonic fantasias.
