You are in: Home > Sections and films > Michael Powell


Michael Powell  
 


A Canterbury Tale


BFI NFTVA-TIK DATORREN KOPIA/COPY FROM BFI NFTVA/COPIA PROCEDENTE DE BFI NFTVA

Three wartime ’pilgrims' find themselves near Canterbury, and try to solve the mystery of the ’phantom glueman' who is attacking girls at night. Their inquiries lead them to suspect the local magistrate, a staunch advocate of traditional values. As they converge on Canterbury, all receive unexpected ’blessings', which point toward their postwar futures, and the glueman's unmasking is forgotten amid celebrations on the eve of D-Day.

With A Canterbury Tale (1944), Powell and Pressburger began to look beyond the now foreseeable end of the war. The result perplexed even the film's relatively few admirers, and it was, like Blimp, soon cut to make it more conventionally acceptable. In its original version, the film opens with a brief evocation of Chaucer's pilgrims journeying to Canterbury, which is magically connected with the present when the image of a bird becomes that of a fighter, an early anticipation, as its new admirers have noted, of the bone that becomes a spaceship in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). We are to see the servicemen as unsuspecting latter-day pilgrims, stranded in wartime limbo, needing something to make sense of their lives.
Ian Christie (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger: Arrows of Desire)

 

 


YEAR
  1944
PRODUCTION
  Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
The Archers
DIRECTOR
  Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
SCREENPLAY
  Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
PHOTOGRAPHY
  Erwin Hillier
MUSIC
  Allan Gray
EDITION
  John Seabourne
CAST
  Eric Portman (Thomas Colpeper), Sheila Sim (Alison Smith), Dennis Price (Sgt. Peter Gibbs), Sgt. John Sweet (Sgt. Bob Johnson), Esmond Knight (Village idiot)
RUNNING TIME
  124 m.

 
Back
 

 


ASSOCIATE INSTITUTIONS


OFFICIAL SPONSOR




TECHNOLOGICAL BACK-UP

COLLABORATOR

OTHER SPONSORS