Beginning in the late '30s, director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger worked as a team for nearly 20 years and for most of that time they shared an on screen credit card unique in world cinema. They signed their films with the title, 'written, produced and directed by". They called their UK based independent production unit The Archers. (The brand featured an arrow thudding into a target and when they felt confident they’d done a good job, it would hit dead centre.)
British film, even today, is still famous for a style of gritty 'truth’ and an attitude to story that’s rooted in social reality. (Never mind that is something of a critics’ cliché worth tearing into!) Eccentric, full of fantasy, inventive and boldly cinematic, The Archers’ films, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) amongst them, seem to be, for many historians and fans, doggedly 'un-British".
Madman has now released two mid-period black and white Archers’ films, A Canterbury Tale (1944) and I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) and like virtually all the Powell and Pressburge catalogue, they are essential.
In later years, Powell would complain that Canterbury was a bit of botch job. Still, it’s a wonderful film; bizarre, and pulsing with a weird sexual undertow, it abounds with mysticism, beautiful images and a plot that’s as compelling as it is daffy.
As with the other seven films made by the Archers during WWII, its foundations lay in propaganda aims. Made as the Allies were preparing the D-Day invasion, the point was to produce a story that demonstrated that the Americans and English were fighting for the same values.
Set in Kent and deriving from Chaucer’s famous poem, the story concerns three characters on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Alison (Sheila Sim) is a tough lass, a modern girl not prepared to accept the role assigned her by society. Sergeant Peter (Dennis Price) is a brash Englishman. Bob (John Sweet) is a sweet as apple pie GI. Together, these three troop off on a spiritual quest that celebrates nature, history and the mystic in the face of war, modernity and materialism. What threatens to stop them is a 'madman" who attacks English girls with glue; Alison becomes a victim because she is seen fraternising with Americans!
The cinematography, by Erwin Hillier is noir-like, but the atmosphere is pure fable.
