Powell and Pressburger’s eternal England

In 1975, Martin Scorsese visited Britain. He had just completed Taxi Driver  and was perhaps the hottest young director in Hollywood. Arriving in London, he began asking about Powell and Pressburger, the creative partnership whose films from the 1940s and 1950s had inspired his love of cinema. Eventually, a meeting was arranged with Michael Powell, now a shy pensioner who was struggling to pay the bills, since his film about a serial killer, Peeping Tom, had been banned by the censor in 1960. Yet, as Powell sat in a restaurant with the young American, Scorsese explained how his films had influenced an entire generation of directors, from Steven Spielberg to Francis Ford Coppola.

The best evidence of this influence is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film’s opening sequence, a prehistoric ape throws a bone into the air; as it falls, the camera jump-cuts to a satellite floating in space. The trick was lifted from Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, which begins with a group of pilgrims making their way across medieval England. When a falconer sets a bird of prey into flight, it soars from his arm and sweeps through the air, to become a Spitfire diving from the sky. In a single cut, the viewer is carried from Chaucer’s England to the Battle of Britain.

Nonetheless, A Canterbury Tale is less well-known than it deserves. The film tells the story of three accidental pilgrims in the fictional Kentish village of Chillingbourne during the Second World War. One is an American GI from rural Oregon, another is a British sergeant and former cinema organist, the third is a London shop-assistant turned land girl. When they get off a late train and make their way through the blackout-darkened streets of the village, an unseen figure throws glue onto the land girl’s hair. On learning that several local women have suffered similar attacks at night, the pilgrims decide to stay and solve the mystery of the ‘Glue Man’.

When they were cast, the three actors were unknown. Their engaging performances mix cheerful innocence with the wistfulness of wartime: the American’s sweetheart has stopped writing letters and the land girl’s fiancé is missing, presumed dead. Similarly, though A Canterbury Tale is set in an everlasting English summer – the downs scattered with wildflowers, the orchards coming into fruit – the farm tracks are being used for tank practice and the cathedral city is cratered from German bombing. The film suggests, however, that rural England endures despite the fighting, with its farms and rectories and half-timbered pubs.

Michael Powell was born into this world. Growing up in the Kent countryside, he attended The King’s School, Canterbury. A Canterbury Tale combines a documentary-like record of traditional village life with whimsical scenes that might have been lifted from memory, from the banter between blacksmiths and wheelwrights to the pitched battle between rival armies of local boys. ‘Frankly, the film is about Michael’s love of his birthplace and all that he felt about England’, Powell’s widow explained after his death. The pastoral nostalgia is offset, however, by the menacing presence of the war, emphasised in the expressionist cinematography that uses the blackout to create moody, chiaroscuro shots.

Powell’s creative partner, Emeric Pressburger, was born to a Hungarian-Jewish family and worked as a screenwriter in Berlin and Paris, before emigrating to London to escape the Nazis. The two men began to collaborate on morale-boosting films in 1939 and worked together for the next 18 years, with Powell directing and Pressburger writing the scripts. Pressburger’s affection for England was that of the refugee who finds sanctuary in its settled rhythms, its etiquette and eccentricity – he even spent his last decades occupying a cottage in a quiet corner of Suffolk. And the films he made with Powell during and after the war share a deep fascination for the country’s landscape, legends and national character.

Chillingbourne is located off the ancient Pilgrims’ Way, near the hill where travellers first caught sight of the cathedral. When the land girl climbs onto the downs by herself, she imagines that she can hear the voices and instruments of those medieval pilgrims still sounding. It’s an idea that might have been borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, another meditation on Englishness written by an insider-outsider during the dark days of war, which describes a series of resonant encounters in rural settings to express the idea that the present is the place where the past is preserved.

The complete volume of Four Quartets was first published in England in 1944, the same year that A Canterbury Tale was released. Both works share the sense that England’s national identity is embedded in its literature and its landscape, and that this identity is spiritual at its deepest level, maintained in the rituals and traditions of faith. When the three pilgrims finally reach Canterbury, each one receives a blessing, a chance meeting that connects them again to the person they were before the war. The same message was intended for the film’s viewing public: preserving the past gives hope for a future when the fighting has ended.

On its release, A Canterbury Tale was a flop, with one critic calling the story ‘silly beyond belief’. In later life, Powell claimed that the film failed as ‘a detective thriller’ because of the flimsy plot. Its narrative is certainly meandering, while the mystery only ever has a single suspect: a local landowner and magistrate called Thomas Culpeper. The magistrate has a deep love for England’s history and scenery; when an army camp is established close to Chillingbourne, he is provided with an audience for his evening lectures. But then the soldiers start taking local girls out to the cinema instead, so he organises the Glue Man attacks to frighten these girls off going on dates.

A Canterbury Tale passes no judgment on Culpeper. The viewer must decide whether the magistrate is a puckish trickster, a thwarted idealist or a misguided fanatic. During a final confrontation with the pilgrims, Culpeper claims that he wants to teach people to love their country and its beauty. ‘Who cares about these things in wartime?’ one of the pilgrims asks, only for the magistrate to reply: ‘Who cares about them in peacetime?’ For Culpeper, apathy about the nation’s heritage is a greater risk than the German bombs; in fact, the war is an opportunity to remind society what matters most. And, though the magistrate’s solution to this apathy is bizarre, the decay of so many British institutions once the fighting ended suggests that his fears were founded.

Commentary on national character is not a requirement for a great work of art. However, great works of art often provide the most profound insights into the nations that created them. A Canterbury Tale suggests that love of country does not mean some romanticised retreat into the past, but rather drawing on England’s heritage to navigate the uncertainty of the modern world. As a result, the film floats free from its origins as wartime propaganda to become one of cinema’s most beautiful explorations of history and belief. Though the pace is slow and the plot dreamlike, it finds space for art and nature, friendship and love, nation and faith – all the things people sacrifice their lives for.