At the outbreak of World War II all cinemas in Britain were closed.
But their value to the maintenance of morale was soon appreciated, and they
were reopened to become one of the principal sources of recreation for the
nation at war.
Feature films were seen as providing not just escapist entertainment but
also instruction and information.
So for the duration of the war they operated under the watchful eye of both
the British Board of Film Censors and the Ministry of Information.
Lord Macmillan, the first wartime Minister of Information, issued a memorandum
in 1940 suggesting three themes for propagandist feature films: what Britain
was fighting for, how Britain was fighting and the need for sacrifice.
(1)
The industry responded to these suggestions and, in so doing, experienced
perhaps its finest hour.
It enjoyed a surge of creativity, an explosion of native talent such as
it had not before witnessed.
The nature and demands of the situation focused the mind of the film world
squarely and continuously on the projection of Britain and the British people,
something that had on the whole not occurred in the 1930s.
(2)
The earliest British war film, The Lion Has Wings, rapidly put together
by producer Alexander Korda and on view by November 1939, embodied many
of the themes which were to be reworked by later and better films.
It established
the images of the two sides for the duration by contrasting the goodnatured,
decent, hardworking, democratic British, with their sense of humour and
their love of sport, and the regimented, fanatical, jackbooted Nazis, marching
in faceless formation.
The film looked both to the future and to the past - to the future in the
documentary-style reconstruction of wartime operations, and to the past
in the staged sequences of the response to the war of a "typical British
couple", the very upper-middle-class Ralph Richardson and Merle Oberon,
scenes which evoked the rigidly stratified class system enshrined in the
films of the 1930s.
Initially the cinema continued to reflect this class-bound 1930s tradition,
resolutely middle-class in tone and values and with little realistic evocation
of the lives of working-class people.
In films like Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich (1940) the war was
treated as a gentlemanly jape, in which an upper-class hero (Rex Harrison)
ran rings around the humourless, ranting, dunderheaded Hun.
The apotheosis of the romanticised, classbound and hopelessly out-of-touch
war film was Ealing's Ships With Wings (1941), a Boy's Own Paper
yarn in which a disgraced Fleet Air Arm Officer (John Clements) redeems
his honour by undertaking a suicide mission.
It received such a hostile press that Michael Balcon, head of Ealing, took
the decision to produce essentially realistic stories of Britain at war.
He turned therefore to the only group in Britain that was familiar with
the evocation of real life - the documentarists.
This group, nurtured in the 1930s by John Grierson, was committed to the
concept of realism in setting, mood and content and to the dramatisation
of the everyday experience of ordinary people.
Several of them, notably Harry Watt and Alberto Cavalcanti, went to work
for Ealing Studios, and from that time on the documentary influence permeated
the whole field of feature film production.
Except for a few like P&P who never "joined" the "documentary movement".
The image of a nation divided by class barriers and epitomised by the notorious
slogan of the early war years - "Your courage, your cheerfulness,
your resolution will bring us victory" - was replaced by the
concept of the "People's War", the idea of ordinary people pulling together
to defeat a common foe.
Ealing's war films exemplify the new image.
Typical of them is San Demetrio - London (1943), recounting the true
story of the salvaging of a Merchant Navy tanker by part of its crew, a
cross-section of ordinary chaps, and The Bells Go Down (1943), dramatising
the work of the Auxiliary Fire Service in London.
Significantly, neither of these films had an officer-and-gentleman hero.
Indeed, the lifestyle and rationale of the old-style officer and gentleman
was comprehensively demolished in Michael Powell's and Emeric Pressburger's
controversial The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).
Surely P&P's attitude to Blimp is more complex/ambiguous - Roger
Comradeship and co-operation, dedication to duty and self-sacrifice, a self-deprecating
good humour and unselfconscious modesty characterised the films about the
fighting services.
The war produced a masterpiece for each.
For the Navy there was In Which We Serve (1942), written, produced,
co-directed and scored by Noel Coward, who also played the leading role.
It was based on the true story of the sinking of HMS Kelly, the ship
commanded by Coward's friend Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Carol Reed's The Way Ahead (1944), scripted by Peter Ustinov and
Eric Ambler, was a semi-documentary account of how a group of conscripts
from all walks of life were welded into a disciplined army unit.
Anthony Asquith's The Way to the Stars (1945), scripted by Terence
Rattigan, recalled life on a single RAF station between 1940 and 1944, its
joys and losses, its tragedies and camaraderie.
The contribution of women to the war effort was vital, and the cinema's
tribute to them reflected the dramatic change in their social role and expectations.
Leslie Howard's The Gentle Sex (1943) was a female version of
The Way Ahead, a realistic account of the training of a group of
women from all classes and backgrounds in the ATS.
Frank Launder's and Sidney Gilliat's moving and memorable Millions Like
Us (1943) dramatised the experiences of another mixed group of girls
drafted to work in an aircraft factory.
All these films contained characters and situations that were sympathetically
and realistically depicted.
They both reflected the shared experience of the audience and promoted that
spirit of co-operation and self sacrifice which was needed to win the war.
Films about why Britain was fighting were rarer than films about how she
was fighting, perhaps because of the difficulty of constructing acceptably
entertaining stories around sophisticated ideological and philosophical
concepts.
Probably the best programmatic account was by Michael Powell's and Emeric
Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941).
Financed by the Ministry of Information, it told the gripping story of a
stranded crew of a Nazi submarine making their way across Canada towards
the neutral United States and encountering en route various representatives
of democracy.
An uncommitted French Canadian trapper (Laurence Olivier) turns against
the Nazis when they maltreat the 'racially inferior' Eskimos.
A democratic Christian community of Hutterite exiles, led by Anton Walbrook,
demonstrate the workability of a system of equality, co-operation and Christian
love.
A donnish aesthete (Leslie Howard) beats one of the Nazis to pulp when they
burn his books and pictures.
Finally, an ordinary Canadian soldier (Raymond Massey) takes on and defeats
the Nazi 'superman' commanding the fugitives (Eric Portman).
The Nazis are thus effectively depicted as standing for cruelty, tyranny,
arrogance and philistinism.
It was clear what we were fighting against.
But what sort of England were we fighting for?
The war brought into sharp focus the meaning of England and Englishness.
The result was a spate of books analysing and investigating England and
the English, books with titles like The English People and The
Character of England.
Anthologies of poetry and prose also sought to project an image of England.
One such was Collie Knox's Forever England (1943).
It contains poetry by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Kipling and Browning apostrophising
England, speeches by Churchill, Asquith and Disraeli eulogising England,
essays on the armed forces, the church, cricket and the public schools,
and comments by sympathetic foreigners on what they see as the essence of
Englishness.
Note: Public schools in the UK are fee paying, often boarding schools.
This was because the first schools were church schools and they
imposed strict admissions policies. In comparison to those, public
schools are open to anyone (who can pay).
Over and over again, in these and similar works, one finds the ideas that
together represent the concept 'England' - a love of tradition, balance
and order; a belief in tolerance and humanity; a sense of humour.
But also highlighted is that visionary aspect of Englishness, that fey,
mystical quality, that striving after the secrets of the eternal that crops
up periodically in English history and English thought.
It is there in the music of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, in the writings
of Kipling and Haggard, in, the poetry of Newbolt and Rupert Brooke.
It is associated inextricably with war and can be seen in the lifestyles
and ideas of a remarkable succession of soldier-mystics who sought out deserts
and high places in order to commune with the Almighty - Lawrence of Arabia,
Gordon of Khartoum, Younghusband of Tibet and Orde Wingate of the Chindits.
(3)
It is deeply Romantic and deeply emotional.
But then there is in wartime a heightening of the emotions, a quickening
of the pulse.
It is a time for poetry and brave words, for sentiments can be uttered and
felt and believed that in prosaic peacetime seem inflated, exaggerated,
unreal.
Feelings come bubbling to the surface in people who face every day the prospect
of death, feelings that in ordinary times are buried so deep that their
existence may not even be consciously acknowledged.
That is why C.A. Lejeune, the influential film critic of the Observer
, was wrong when, reviewing The Gentle Sex in 1943, she wrote:
It seems tolerably clear by now that the best thing the war is likely to
draw out of the cinema is not poetry but prose; no masterpiece but a number
of small, candid snapshots of the soul of the people ....
To create or to savour the larger forms of art requires leisure of mind,
and that is a thing we have not.
(4)
She had reckoned without the mystical vision summoned up by the war in the
Romantic Right (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) and the Romantic
Left (Humphrey Jennings), whose meditations on England were to produce celluloid
poetry of the highest order.
Few film-makers have been as controversial, as innovative, as adventurous
or as deeply Romantic as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
(5)
Working within mainstream commercial cinema, they produced a succession
of films that were both popular entertainment and high art, that were distinctively
and recognisably personal, yet said something profound about England and
the English.
They were without question the most remarkable of several film-making teams
that occupied an influential place in British cinema.
The others include the Korda Brothers (Alexander, Zoltan and Vincent), the
Boulting Brothers (Roy and John), Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, Basil
Dearden and Michael Relph, and Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle.
It was Alexander Korda who first teamed Powell and Pressburger to make
The Spy in Black in 1939.
Pressburger, a Hungarian writer and refugee from Nazi Germany, and Powell,
the Kentish director who had gained a critical reputation after making
Edge of the World (1937) on the island of Foula, worked so well together
that in 1942 they formed The Archers, one of a number of independent production
units working under the overall umbrella of Rank.
They signed their films jointly - Produced, directed and written by Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger - though it was generally recognised that
Pressburger provided the script and Powell directed.
They were anxious to contribute to the cinema's war effort and made two
films on the subject of "how we fight" (One of Our Aircraft is Missing
and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) before turning back
to the subject of "why we fight", first explored in 49th Parallel.
Powell subsequently described A Canterbury Tale (1944) as his version
of "why we fight";
it was an exploration of the spiritual values for which England stands,
testimony to the belief that the roots of the nation lie in the pastoral
and to the idea of England as synonymous with freedom.
He also called it a "crusade against materialism".
(6)
The England evoked by A Canterbury Tale is the England of Chaucer
and Shakespeare, a rural England of half-timbered cottages and stately country
houses, quiet, leafy churchyards and rich hopfields, an England whose spirit
resides in Thomas Colpeper, gentleman farmer, magistrate, historian and
archaeologist, a man who understands England's nature and seeks to communicate
her values.
It is a film, on the one hand, of astonishing tranquillity and entrancing
visual beauty and, on the other, of riveting power and mystical suggestiveness.
Superbly photographed at genuine Kentish locations, it hymns the beauties
of the countryside, which are seen as timeless and unchanging.
The film recreates the Canterbury pilgrimage for a trio of latter-day visitors
in search of spiritual peace.
The timelessness is encapsulated at the outset, as Esmond Knight reads the
introduction to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Old English and the camera
moves in on a map of medieval England to rest on the road to Canterbury.
Then, amid laughter and the jingle of accoutrements, Chaucer and the pilgrims
are seen riding along the Pilgrim's Way, the camera picking out individual
faces.
A falconer unhoods his bird, which flies away; it dissolves into a plane
sweeping over the same countryside; the director cuts back to the falconer's
face, but it is now the face of a man wearing modern army uniform.
The narrator merely underlines what the camera has shown us - the land is
still the same and the people are the same.
But there are new pilgrims now - and troop carriers lurch suddenly into
view.
For all this, the spiritual values are eternal; a return to them will bring
peace of mind.
It is why we fight.
Much of the action of the film is set in and around a Kentish village, which
appears at the outset almost as a spirit village like Brigadoon, emerging
from the enveloping mist and from a distant past.
Compare also with the misty scenes of Joan's arrival in the Scottish
village in IKWIG.
It is called Chillingbourne and with its stationmaster called Duckett, its
squire Colpeper, its innkeeper Woodcock and its inn where Queen Elizabeth
I herself is reputed to have slept, the "Hand of Glory" its image and ambience
is purest Elizabethan.
It even has a village idiot.
Colpeper, (Eric Portman) is first discovered working at his desk in a sixteenth-century,
panelled office in the town hall.
He is shot from a reverential low angle across a wooden beam inscribed with
the words "Honour the Truth".
Later, he is seen scything his grass like some stout Tudor yeoman, eliciting
from Alison, one of the modem pilgrims, the admiring comment: "He looks
so right."
Colpeper talks of miracles, appears and disappears mysteriously, is seen
haloed with light during his lecture in the village hall.
Like the village, he seems magical, causing events to happen, manipulating
lives like a latter-day Prospero.
Magic is an integral part of Powell's vision, evident both in his world-view
and in the technical realisation of his films, which often amounts to visual
wizardry.
It is no coincidence that a film of Shakespeare's The Tempest is
a long-cherished and as yet unfulfilled project of Powell.
Spells, prophecies, sorcery and mysticism bind together such apparently
disparate films as - The Thief of Bagdad, The Red Shoes,
The Elusive Pimpernel, Black Narcissus, Gone to Earth,
I Know Where I'm Going and especially A Matter of Life and Death
, which Powell himself described as "a most wonderful conjuring trick".
(7)
Mysticism in The Elusive Pimpernal??
The three modem pilgrims on their way to Canterbury are the American Sergeant
Bob Johnson (Sergeant John Sweet), the Englishman Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis
Price) and the English Land Army girl Alison Smith (Sheila Sim).
Note: "Land Army girls were called up to help work the land while
the young men went off to fight
At the outset they are in the dark - literally - and as the film progresses
they find their way towards the light and the truth.
They arrive at Chillingbourne in the middle of the night, their faces unseen
initially by us or by each other.
Note: Chillingbourne is a fictional name, probably made up from Chilham
and Littlebourne or Bekesbourne where Powell grew up.
They set out to walk to the village and are beset by a mysterious attacker
in a military overcoat, who pours glue on Alison's hair and flees.
They chase him into the fog and lose him, but learn that this is the eleventh
such attack by a figure known locally as the "Glue Man".
Well it's just dark, not fog - but they certainly can't see him.
They decide to find out who he is.
Although there are elements of detective work in the plot, as the three
visitors question previous victims, establish the time scale of the attacks
and search for evidence of glue purchases, it is obvious from the outset
who the "Glue Man" is, for Colpeper chides himself for not closing the black-out
curtains properly, and the camera moves into a bold close-up of his hastily
abandoned Home Guard jacket in a cupboard.
The question with which the film is really concerned is his motive for making
the attacks, and that leads to an exposition of the message of spiritual
peace, which changes the lives of the three "detectives".
All three are troubled souls.
Bob Johnson is worried because he has not heard from his girl and thinks
that she has left him.
But Bob also serves two other symbolic functions.
First and most obviously, he underlines the need for Anglo-American solidarity.
(8)
The film carefully exposes the locals' patronising attitude towards this
"Yank": the station master rejects his claim to be a sergeant because his
stripes are the wrong way up; the police sergeant retorts,
"This is Chillingbourne, not Chicago" when Bob asks if he is armed;
and the fluttering, giggling
maid at the inn insists he have early-morning tea rather than his usual
coffee.
But he is sceptical about the weight of British tradition and cannot understand
the telephones, the driving on the wrong side of the road and especially
the incessant tea-drinking.
But, as Peter points out to him, it is the tea-drinkers of the world - the
Soviet Union, China and Britain - who have successfully resisted the onslaught
of the Axis powers.
Bob is to find that he has much more in common with the English than he
had supposed; in particular, his co-operation with the English pilgrims,
Alison and Peter, successfully unmasks the "Glue Man".
But, more centrally, Bob is spiritually and aesthetically asleep.
He has spent all his leaves in the cinema and has not sought out the beauties
of the countryside.
Even when in Salisbury he noted only its fine cinemas.
Colpeper, hearing of this, laments the fact that all Bob has seen of England
has been its movie houses and expresses his concern lest people become used
to seeing England from their cinema seats.
He urges Bob to visit Canterbury Cathedral ("You can't miss it; it is just
behind the movie theatre").
The first step towards Bob's spiritual awakening and his appreciation of
the English is taken when with Alison he visits the rural wheelwrights,
the Hortons, and discusses their craft with them.
He wins their admiration through his knowledge of the techniques of wood
seasoning and reveals that he comes from an Oregon family of lumberjacks.
"We speak the same language", says Bob of his encounter with Jim Horton,
an encounter which celebrates both the innate virtues of rural craftsmanship
and the common bonds of England and America.
Alison, baffled by the discussion, replies sadly: "I'm English, and we don't
speak the same language."
This is one of the film's most important themes, reinforced by the character
of Peter that the city dweller, the product of urban culture, has lost touch
with his rural roots and the values that they embody.
Bob's experiences in Chillingbourne lead him to tell Peter on the Pilgrim's
Way that his mind is truly at peace for the first time.
Alison too finds peace.
She was a shop assistant in a garden furniture department before the war.
She loved the countryside but as a Visitor.
She never understood it.
Now she is mourning the loss of her fiancé, a geologist with the
RAF who has been shot down.
His father had disapproved of his son's relationship with a shopgirl.
"It would need an earthquake to change his mind", she says.
"We're having one", replies Colpeper.
But what the film sees as important is that while there may be social change,
and the reconciliation of her fiancé's father with Alison acknowledges
this, there must be cultural continuity.
Alison falls under Colpeper's spell completely.
At a lecture in the village hall, attended by soldiers from the local camp,
Colpeper talks, with the aid of slides, of the beauties of the countryside
and of Old England.
His talk is beautifully delivered by Eric Portman in silhouette, with only
his eyes visible, until his face is suddenly and dramatically lit up at
the climax of the speech.
Alison is so entranced that in her mind she hears the., clatter of horses
hooves and the merry chatter-of the medieval pilgrims.
She does so again when she goes walking on the Pilgrim's Way and Colpeper
suddenly appears from the long grass to talk to her of miracles.
The third pilgrim, Peter Gibbs holds out longest.
A cynical materialist, he calls on and denounces Colpeper as just
another missionary ("The trouble about with this
country is that every other man has got a bee in his bonnet about something").
He explains to Colpeper that although trained as a church organist, he now
plays a cinema organ in the West End for a good wage.
He is indifferent to the countryside and admits to spending his Sundays
playing cards and waiting for the pubs to open.
The climax of the film comes after they have identified Colpeper as the
"Glue Man", and Gibbs insists that they report him the police in Canterbury.
All three travel to Canterbury with Colpeper, who seeks to explain his motive
for the attacks.
He had sought for years to spread a knowledge of the country and a love
of
it's beuty before the war no one would listen.
When the war came an army camp was established at Chillingbourne, and he
tried again.
But the soldiers were interested only in girls and in going with to the
cinema and dances.
So in order to save the village girls from the consequences of these casual
liaisons, to protect the wives and sweethearts of the soldiers left behind,
and to drum up audiences for his lectures, he launched the "Glue Man" attacks.
There is a distinct element of misogyny in Colpeper's stance, and the film
makes no apology for it.
He is a bachelor, living with his mother.
He rejects the services of Alison as a land girl on his farm, preferring
a male farm worker.
At almost his first appearance he demonstrates with approval the use of
the ducking stool, for dealing with gossiping women, to Sergeant Johnson.
Although he admits later that he has been wrong about Alison, who has come
to share his mystic vision, he firmly answers "No" when she asks if occurred
to him to invite girls to his lectures.
He seems to see girls silly, frivolous, and second-rate, weaker vessels
who serve only and to distract them, from their duties to their families
and their opportunity to learn about the true meaning of England.
Alison and Bob accept Colpeper's explanation of his behaviour, but Peter
is adamant that he must be reported.
Colpeper is prepared for whatever may happen, observing serenely: "There
are higher courts than the local bench of magistrates" and gazing out at
the Cathedral.
They alight from the train and converge with foreordained inevitability,
on the Cathedral.
Gibbs learns that the Police Inspector whom he wishes to see is there.
Entering, he picks up a sheet of music that the cathedral organist has providentially
dropped and is invited to play.
He strikes up with Bach's Toccata and Fugue,
loses himself in the music and rediscovers his real vocation.
Bob, his face transfigured as he recalls that his grandfather built the
first Baptist church in Cedar County, Oregon, meets a fellow soldier bearing
a sheaf of letters from his girl.
She has not forgotten him but is in Australia with the WAAC's.
Alison searches for the garage where she has left the caravan that she and
her geologist fiancé shared on their holiday there in 1940.
The camera tracks her along the bomb-damaged streets, but above the ruins
towers the Cathedral, eternal and indestructible.
When she eventually finds the caravan it is cobwebbed and moth-eaten and,
faced by this symbol of her lost happiness, she bursts into tears.
Colpeper appears and talks cryptically of the transitoriness of caravan
life and the inevitability of moving on.
Suddenly the garage owner arrives with a message from the father of her
fiancé, Jeffrey.
He has been looking for her to tell her that Jeffrey is alive and at Gibraltar.
She turns to tell Colpeper, but he has gone as mysteriously as he appeared.
Joyously, she throws open the windows of the caravan .
The film ends with a regiment of soldiers, about to leave for action overseas,
Processing through the Canterbury streets to the Cathedral, where Peter
plays the organ triumphantly.
Bob, Alison and Jeffrey's father join the congregation, and Colpeper, unseen,
slips in too.
All sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers"; the bells ring; and the last shot
is of the Cathedral as seen from the Pilgrim's Way.
This final sequence prefigures the inevitable victory for which we fight
on behalf of our country, freedom, beauty, tolerance and spirituality.
A Canterbury Tale rejoices in a sense of the living past, in country
crafts, rural beauty, the intimacy of man and nature, and this joy is conveyed
in passages of pure camera poetry, with much use of point-of-view shots
to lead the audience into the countryside and the Cathedral.
These sequences do not advance the plot but celebrate the mood and message.
There is the soaring evocation of Canterbury Cathedral around which the
camera tracks.
pans and cranes as the organ music surges.
There is the loving depiction of country crafts, which picks out local faces,
felled timber and age-old instruments.
There is, in particular, the wonderfully shot sequence of a battle between
two sets of village boys; one army, on a boat, is tracked along the river
bank by the camera and attacked by its rivals in a sequence of staccato
cutting and bold close-ups.
The leaders of the armies are recruited by Bob to help search for evidence
on the "Glue Man", but the sequence as it stands exists to celebrate boyish
high spirits in the pristine heart of the countryside.
(9)
The cumulative effect of such sequences wholly justifies the decision of
Prudence Honeywood, who tells Alison that the only man who ever asked her
to marry him wanted to take her away from this to live in the town
and she refused him.
The film is constructed like a symphony, orchestrating three pilgrims, which
merge and mingle with a central dominant theme and (Colpeper and his message)
until all blend triumphantly at the climax, with the converging of the
characters on the Cathedral, cut, to the music.
Powell later observed:
At the time nobody thought that A Canterbury Tale worked say that
it contained some of my favourite sequences ...
you take the last three reels of the film when all three pilgrims converge
on Canterbury.
I thought that had a most wonderful movement.
(10)
Powell is, of course, powerfully assisted by Pressburger's script, Erwin
Hillier's camerawork, which was universally praised, and by a strong cast.
There was considerable critical praise for Sergeant John Sweet, an American
soldier who had previously acted on stage in the all-soldier cast of a production
of Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St Mark, put on in London by the
Special Service Division of the US War Department.
He was not a professional actor and was chosen, according to the film's
press book, because he had "all the attributes of the ordinary young man".
(11)
But the film is dominated and held together by the soft-spoken, enigmatic
Eric Portman whose performance as the Nazi submarine Powell and Pressburger's
49th Parallel had made him a major star and who was to carve out
a career unique in British films by playing a succession of haunted murderers,
quirky maniacs and demented millionaires.
There was something cold, sinister but compelling about his personality,
something out of the ordinary, and Powell utilised that quality here to
imbue Colpeper, the self-confessed missionary, with an unearthly yet serene
omniscience.
In celebrating the countryside as the source of national strength, Powell
was in the mainstream British tradition, which has been so brilliantly expounded
(indeed, indicted) by Martin Wiener and which is encapsulated in the words
of the popular song of World War II:
There'll always be an England
While there's a country lane
Wherever there's a cottage small
Beside a field of grain
There'll always be an England
While there's a busy street,
Wherever there's a turning wheel,
A million marching feet.
Red, white and blue; what does it mean to you?
Surely you're proud, shout it aloud,
"Britons, awake!"
The empire too, we can depend on you.
Freedom remains. These are the chains
Nothing can break.
There'll always be an England,
And England shall be free
If England means as much to you
As England means to me.
words & music Parker and Charles.
© unknown
Wiener sees in the glorification of the countryside and all things rural
a deliberate rejection of the urban and industrial reality of Britain by
a non-industrial and anti-materialist patrician culture.
Endorsed by a gentrified bourgeoisie this attitude led to what Wiener calls
"the cultural containment of industrial capitalism", a process which contributed
powerfully to Britain's industrial decline.
(12)
The cultural conservatism of the dominant elite determined the prevalent
image of England and Englishness.
Donald Home, seeking to understand what makes England tick, proposed
two rival metaphors for Englishness - the Northern, which was pragmatic,
empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific,
serious and struggle-oriented, and the Southern, romantic, illogical, muddled,
lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, and frivolous.
(13)
Whereas the Northern was urban and industrial, prevailed because it was
rural, because it was able to accommodate the apparently irreconcilable
ideals of the Romantic Right (country house, country church, squire, parson
and deferential society) and the Romantic Right (folk society, the village,
rural crafts and the honest peasantry).
A Canterbury Tale, deliberately designed as a "crusade against materialism",
provides a perfect visual expression of all these elements.
The myth of England as essentially rural and essentially unchanging appealed
across party lines to both conservatives and socialists.
Rudyard Kipling turned in later life from celebrating the robust spirit
of
Empire to hymning the beauties of rural life in Sussex
(Puck of Pook's Hill, "Our England is a Garden", etc.),
and Sir Henry Newbolt wrote of the magical of the English
landscape in The Old Country.
(14)
The distaste for industrial society that lay behind such Arcadian exercises
was summed up by another right-wing writer Sir Arthur Bryant, who in a series
of talks entitled The National Character, first delivered on the
wireless and later published in book form, declared:
The most important thing about our English civilisation is that it grew
in the country and has only comparatively lately been transported to the
town. Half our present troubles can, I believe, be traced to this.
Our industrial discontent, the restless, dissatisfied state of our family
life, the discomfort, ugliness and overcrowding of our towns, in part spring
from the fact that every Englishman is so certain that the only lasting
Utopia for him is a rose garden and a cottage in the country that he can
never settle down seriously to make himself comfortable in a town ....
Most of us today are town dwellers, yet there are very few of us whose great-great-great-grandparents
were not country folk, and, even if we have no idea who they were or from
what shire they hailed, our subconscious selves hark back to their instincts
and ways of life.
We are shut off from them as it were by a tunnel of two or three generations
- lost in the darkness of the industrial Revolution - but beyond is the
sunlight of the green fields from which we came.
(15)
The same feeling animated socialists like William Morris and Robert Blatchford,
who propounded the potent myth of a timeless and idealised medieval village
and agricultural society.
Blatchford's Merrie England (1894) was described by G.D.H. Cole as
"the most effective piece of popular socialist propaganda ever written".
(16)
After World War I, perhaps as a result of it, this rural nostalgia intensified.
There were novels about the countryside, books about the English heritage
and the English character stressing the rural myth.
As Sir Denis Brogan wrote in 1943, in a book seeking to explain England
to the Americans:
Most people in England live in large industrial towns; but they are not
written about.
Millions live in the great urban aggregate that is called London without
seeing Piccadilly Circus or St Paul's once a month, Mr Priestley has done
a good deal to restore the balance, but no one has done what Arnold Bennett
did - given a view of English life outside London and the country that was
accepted as a natural literary phenomenon.
We have gloomy stories of the depressed area; we have innumerable detective
stories.
But Love on the Dole and Murder in the Home Counties do not
cover all or nearly all of English life.
The English people show that they know this by reading American fiction
with avidity, just as American people show their good judgement in preferring
their own more lively, human and truthful fiction to the English standard
brands.
And the great sin of English fiction, English movies, English plays, English
public relations in general, is the refusal to admit that the Englishman
is a townsman.
(17)
This "sin", was apparent even in a comic novel like A.G. MacDonell's
England, their England, which had Scot Donald Cameron searching for
the meaning of England.
He discovers at the end, when he has a Mystical vision of a sort of pilgrimage
of poets, all wreathed in good humour, as he lies on a perfect summer day
in the grass neat Winchester Cathedral, that it is to be found in the mingling
of the pastoral and the poetic.
The vision fades:
And there was no longer any trace of the passing of that absurd host of
kindly, laughter-loving warrior poets but only what they have left behind
them the muted voices of grazing sheep, and the merry click of bat upon
ball and the peaceful green fields of England, and the water meads and the
bells of the cathedral.
(18)
It is hard to believe that we are not looking here at the: seeds of the
idea that gave rise to A Canterbury Tale.
This vision was shared by the man who epitomised England, if anyone did,
in the inter-war years, Stanley Baldwin, three times Prime Minister and
the leading figure in the National Government until his retirement in 1937.
He consciously projected himself as a country squire.
In a celebrated speech he declared:
To me England is the country and the country is England ...
The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country
smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against
the whetstone, and the sight of a pIough team coming over the brow of a
hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land,
and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every
works has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England.
(19)
It is against this background and that of Home's Southern metaphor that
it is possible to understand the depiction of "why we fight" the handful
of films that tackle the question.
The England we fight for in A Canterbury Tale and in its analogues
The Tawny Pipit (1944) and The Demi-Paradise (1943) is essentially
rural, timeless and hierarchical.
It makes an interesting contrast with the "how we fight" films, which were
at pains to highlight the social change involved in the lowering of class
barriers and often featured townsmen.
But the Englishman as urban man was really celebrated only in the films
of Humphrey Jennings, who provides an interesting comparison with Powell
and Pressburger.
Jennings, Suffolk-born, Cambridge-educated, was a left-winger, influential
in Mass Observation, steeped in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton and Blake.
His documentaries display the same lambent photography, mystical quality
and feel for landscape as do Powell's feature films.
But for him the recurrent image is St Paul's Cathedral, the church of the
metropolis and not Canterbury Cathedral, the church of the older, rural
England.
In films like Spare Time, London Can Take It, Listen to
Britain, Fires Were Started and Family Portrait Jennings
showed himself able to come to terms with, to explore and to celebrate the
urban England created by the industrial revolution, an event most other
film-makers preferred to ignore.
The intention of A Canterbury Tale was made quite clear by the film's
press book:
A Canterbury Tale is a new story about Britain, her unchanging beauty
and traditions, and of the Old Pilgrims and the New.
As the last scene of the picture fades away, to those who see it and are
British there will come a feeling - just for a moment - of wishing to be
silent, as the thoughts flash through one's mind: "These things I have just
seen and heard are all my parents taught me.
That is Britain, that is me."
(20)
But the reaction of the critics was on the whole one of puzzlement.
Richard Winnington in the News Chronicle expressed the prevalent
view of the film:
Because they represent the only consistent unification of script, production
and direction in British films, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger arouse
expectancy and generally arrive at something different and individual.
Their besetting weakness - lack of coherent purpose in their stories - is
more pronounced than ever in this their latest production ....
Through the fog of a confused and at times vaguely unpleasant story can
be seen a steady if dim flicker of what I think was the main idea of Powell
and Pressburger - to endow an accidental wartime excursion to Canterbury
with the hushed, bated magic of the Pilgrim's Way, to link in mystic suggestion
the past and the present.
And in an odd, untidy sort of way they infuse a lyric feeling into the pastoral
progression of their film.
The quality of poetry is not entirely due to the first-rate and refreshing
photographic compositions of the Kentish countryside, or the "village pageant"
sequences of Chaucer's pilgrims, or the reading of part of his prologue
with a modem bit added, or, as I have suggested, to the story.
It is something to do with Messrs Powell and Pressburger.
(21)
The same tone of dissatisfaction ran through the verdicts of the other critics,
who praised the photography and the acting, the celebration of the Kent
countryside and the visual beauty of the film.
But for the most part they found themselves unable to come to grips with
the mysticism or the psychology of Colpeper.
The Daily Telegraph said:
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have presented the English scene with
such artistry and charm, such a wealth of fresh and amusing incident, that
if the story had been halfway tolerable this would have been a masterpiece.
It isn't and it's not.
The story is silly beyond belief ....
If you can ignore this nonsense, you will enjoy the film for its beauty,
for many shrewd and witty touches, and some excellent acting by Sgt John
Sweet (US Army), Sheila Sim, Dennis Price and Eric Portman.
(22)
The Manchester Guardian could not resist the temptation to describe
the plot of the film as a "sticky mess" but added:
Luckily one can ignore the untidiness and improbabilities and enjoy wholeheartedly
the sheer pictorial beauty of Canterbury and the Pilgrim's Way.
(23)
The Sunday Times called it:
an elaborate, beautiful and often witty piece of muddle.
The story is half highminded fantasy, half schoolboy thriller ....
The exterior work is enchanting and the pictorial beauty of the sequences
in Canterbury Cathedral seem to me beyond praise.
(24)
C.A. Lejeune in the Observer pronounced the final word:
A Canterbury Tale is a remarkable film in which Michael Powell the
writer, has given Michael Powell the director, a pretty shabby story and
the second Powell has almost managed to get away with it.
A Canterbury Tale is about a Kentish JP who believes so deeply in
the study of his native soil that he pours glue on girls' heads in the black-out
lest they seduce the local soldiery from his archaeological lectures.
That's the theme, and to my mind, nothing will make it either a sensible
or pleasant one.
This fellow may be a mystagogue with the love of England in his blood, but
he is plainly a crackpot of a rather unpleasant type, with bees in the bonnet
and blue-bottles in the belfry.
Only a psychiatrist, I imagine, would be deeply interested in his behaviour.
And yet, on this horrid foundation, director Powell has built up a film
that is in parts moving and even dignified.
A man of Kent himself, he has taken his cameras exulting in the green spring
of Kent on a sunny April morning.
His Canterbury is a place loved and understood; his dialogue often simple
and true.
His three young people .... who are all in some way influenced by the mystagogue's
enthusiasm, have for the most part an unaffected charm, and do, suggest
pilgrims undergoing an emotional experience .... The piece is an odd example,
I should say, of a film that might have reached great heights but hasn't.
(25)
As so often, Powell and Presburger were ahead of their time.
They started with the handicap that mysticism is always silly to the unmystical.
But beyond that their adoption of a narrative form that was discursive rather
than strictly linear and their use of a "kinky" hero, neither of which would,
seem remarkable to today's film-makers or cinema-goers, alienated and mystified
critics used to more straightforward and traditional fare.
Audiences seem to have responded in the same way for the film was not a
success at the box office. In an attempt to retrieve something for an
American release, Powell was prevailed upon to cut it and
shoot additional sequence for the 124 minute to 95, and Powell added a Raymond
Massey and Kim Hunter, in which Sergeant Sweet tells the story to his wife
in New York.
It was released in America in 1949 but without success.
A British reissue of the cut version in 1948 also failed.
Powell's original was reconstructed by the British Film in 1977 and has
won increasing admiration.
How far was A Canterbury Tale a reflection of what people really
were fighting for, and how far was it a middle-class cultural myth?
When he toured England in 1933 J.B. Priestly discovered three Englands.
The second was:
The nineteenth-century England, the industrial England of coal iron, steel,
of rows of little houses all alike ... a cynically devastated countryside,
sooty dismal little towns, and still sootier grim fortress-like cities.
This was the England of the Midlands and the North and of Horne's Northern
metaphor.
The third was:
The new post-war England, belonging far more to the age itself than this
land.
This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and
factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant -cinemas and dance-halls
and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths,
motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking grey-hound racing
and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette
coupons ....
It is, of course, essentially democratic.
After a social revolution, there would with luck, be more and not less of
it ....
It is a large-scale, mass-production job, with cut prices.
You could almost accepts Woolworths as its symbol.
Its cheapness is both its strength and its weakness It is
its strength because being cheap, it is the famous equality of opportunity.
Significantly, Powell and Pressburger turned their their backs on these
two images in favour of Priestley's first England:
Of the cathedrals and ministers, and manor and Squire; guide-book and quaint
highways all know this England, which at its best cannot be improved upon
in this world.
That is, as a country to lounge about in; for a tourist who can afford to
pay a fairly stiff price for a poorish dinner, an inconvenient bedroom and
lukewarm water in a small brass jug. ....
It has long ceased to earn its own living ....
There are some people who believe that in some mysterious way we can return
to this Old England, though nothing is said about killing off nine-tenths
of our present population, which would have to be the first step.
The same people might consider competing in a race at Brooklands with a
horse and trap.
The chances are about the same.
(26)
It was this same Priestley who expressed succinctly the war aims of the
majority in one of his wartime broadcasts.
c.f. Colonel Blimp - Priestly reads in place of Clive's
cancelled broadcast.
While for Churchill the aim was victory and, beyond victory, the vague generalised
belief that the world would move forward into "broad, sunlit uplands", for
Priestley it was what came after the war that was vitally important.
We were fighting, he said, "not so that we can go back to anything.
There's nothing that really worked that we can go back to."
So our aim must be "new and better homes - real homes - a decent chance
at last - new life".
(27)
This was what people fought for, and this was what, in the end, they voted
for.
As A.J.P. Taylor wrote of the 1945 election:
The electors cheered Churchill and voted against him.
They displayed no interest in foreign affairs or imperial might.
They cared only for their own future: first housing and then full employment
and social security.
Here Labour offered a convincing programme.
The Conservatives though offering much the same, managed to give the impression
that-they did not believe in it.
(28)
The result was 393 Labour MPs returned to 213 Conservatives and a reforming
government under Clement Attlee which set out to introduce those tangible
benefits for which we had fought.
The time for mysticism was past.
Possibly true, in a strictly political sense in 1945. But remember the
closing lines of Return to the Edge of the World - "The time of miracles
is NOW"
