A Canterbury Tale
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | A Canterbury Tale |
| Country of production | Great Britain |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1944 |
| length | 124 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger |
| script | Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger |
| production | Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger |
| music | Allan Gray |
| camera | Erwin Hillier |
| cut | John Seabourne |
| occupation | |
| |
A Canterbury Tale is a British feature film made in 1944 under the direction of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger . Sheila Sim , Eric Portman , Dennis Price and John Sweet play the leading roles . The film is inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's late medieval Canterbury Tales , but relocates the plot to the setting of the Second World War.
action
One late evening in the summer of 1943 , three people arrive at the train station in the imaginary town of Chillingbourne, ten minutes from Canterbury : Alison Smith, a London saleswoman who has enlisted in the Women's Land Army, whose job it is to conscript for military service To replace men in agriculture; British Sgt. Gibbs, who before the war made his living as an organist in the cinema and whose unit is stationed near Chillingbourne; and the American Sgt. Johnson, who actually wanted to go to Canterbury and accidentally got off one station too early. As soon as they have left the train station, Alison is attacked in the village - which is completely darkened for fear of German air raids - by an unknown person who douses her hair with glue. The three set out to pursue the perpetrator, but without success. When she learned that Alison is not the first victim of the so-called glue-man was (ger .: Glue Man), they decide to investigate the mysterious process and to make the perpetrators arrested.
Early on, her suspicions were directed against the local justice of the peace, Thomas Colpeper, who was interested in England's history and particularly in the historic Pilgrims' Way , which runs alongside Chillingbourne. Together with a group of children, the three of them collect enough evidence enough evidence against Colpeper, they just puzzle over the motive. Colpeper, meanwhile, begins to fall in love with Alison, as she is also interested in English history. The next day the three of them travel to Canterbury: Sgt. Gibbs to report Colpeper to the police; Alison to inspect the caravan of her fiancé, a missing Royal Air Force pilot, parked there; and Sgt. Johnson to meet his comrade Mickey Roczinsky. Surprisingly, Justice of the Peace Colpeper also climbs into her train compartment in Chillingbourne.
Faced with their suspicions, Colpeper does not deny the acts. He explains to the three of them that he wanted to use the glue attacks to prevent young women from going out in the evening and possibly making acquaintances with soldiers stationed nearby while their lovers do their military service far from home. Above all, the lack of female distraction should ensure that the young soldiers attend his evening lectures on local history. Colpeper explains to the three fellow travelers that the pilgrims of yore went to Canterbury to receive blessings or to repent, and this is how their trip to Canterbury ends for these four: Alison learns that her fiancé, believed to be dead, is still alive; Johnson meets Roczinsky, who brings him a whole packet of letters from the woman who Johnson feared had been unfaithful to him; and Gibbs, the simple cinema organist, is finally allowed to play a large church organ in Canterbury Cathedral. Gibbs doesn’t report Colpeper to the police, but the glue man still has to atone: he also learns that Alison’s fiancé is still alive and that he cannot reach her.
Production background
Michael Powell himself grew up in a small village in the county of Kent , which is also where the small fictional village of this film is located, which is why shooting meant a return to his childhood for him in a way. A Canterbury Tale is based on the medieval Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer . In the Canterbury Tales, a group of medieval pilgrims travels to town, which can also be seen in the short medieval prologue at the beginning of the film, before Powell's film jumps into the 1940s for the main plot. The jump happens through a Jump Cut , in which the medieval falcon is transformed into a modern warplane - a Jump Cut, which transforms a bone into a spaceship in the famous Jump Cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick by almost 25 years anticipated.
Of the four main actors, only Eric Portman had film experience. For the professional British theater actor Sheila Sim and Dennis Price meant A Canterbury Tale also the film debut. In the role of the American soldier Bob Johnson , the US actor Burgess Meredith was initially discussed, but the bureaucratic rules of the US Army denied that a professional actor could appear in a feature film during his military service. Powell and Pressburger hired American sergeant John Sweet (* February 8, 1916; † July 5, 2011), who had previously only played in amateur groups and later described the shooting as an exciting, albeit exhausting experience. Bob Johnson was Sweets only film role, he later donated his salary to the NAACP .
Content analysis
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created the film in the context of the Second World War as a celebration of English identity and its peculiarities: essential things such as culture, history, nature, values and the human senses are dealt with in the film; the preservation of English culture is also an important propaganda reason why the country should fight the National Socialists in the war. At the same time, the filming of A Canterbury Tale already indicated the end of the world war and the film also seems to ask what an English post-war society will look like.
reception
A Canterbury Tale was unsuccessful when it went to the box office and received a mixed response from critics. Many praised the camera work and the actors, but were taken aback by the plot and possible messages of the film. In the Sunday Express of May 13, 1944 , Ernest Betts called the film "brilliant, beautiful, but confusing" because the film could be both about Anglo-American relations and could be seen as a hymn to England.
A revision was made for the American cinema market, in which a re-shot frame story with Kim Hunter and Sgt. Sweet was added and Raymond Massey acted as narrator, at the same time the film was shortened by around 20 minutes. But even this revision was unsuccessful. The restored version of the film, now highly praised by the British film historian Ian Christie and the American director Martin Scorsese , was not seen again until the end of the 1970s and has been considered a masterpiece of British cinema ever since.
Peter von Bagh wrote in 2006 that despite the detective story, the film is not about "clues" in the criminalistic sense - rather the characters are looking for clues as to why they have to go to war and find them in culture, history and landscape . In this sense, A Canterbury Tale is similar to the Why We Fight films by Frank Capra . However, the film also immerses itself in people's everyday lives in an unusual way and connects it with the sacred and mystical, which is why Bagh A describes Canterbury Tale as a kind of “mystical neorealism ”: “There are so many moments of wonder in this film, many very plain of them, and many of them gilded by their profound humanity. ”If the main themes of film in general are light and time, he could not think of a more poignant film than A Canterbury Tale .
Web links
- A Canterbury Tale in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christie, Ian: Arrows of Desire. London, 1994, p. 51.
- ↑ Christie, Ian: Arrows of Desire. London, 1994, p. 49.
- ^ John Sweet's memories of making a film. Retrieved April 24, 2018 .
- ^ John Sweet at the Internet Movie Database. Retrieved April 24, 2018 .
- ^ John Sweet's memories of making a film. Retrieved April 24, 2018 .
- ↑ A Tribute: A Canterbury Tale . In: The Criterion Collection . ( criterion.com [accessed April 25, 2018]).
- ^ Xan Brooks: My favorite film: A Canterbury Tale. October 25, 2011, accessed April 25, 2018 .
- ↑ Christie, Ian: Arrows of Desire. London, 1994, p. 51.
- ^ Andrew Moor: A Cinema of Magic Spaces . IB Tauris, 2005, p. 108 .
- ^ A Canterbury Tale at 70: a ray of English sunshine , The Telegraph, Aug. 30, 2014
- ↑ A Tribute: A Canterbury Tale. Retrieved October 23, 2018 .