A Canterbury Tale - British Cinema of the 40s - BBC Radio
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- Опубликовано: 14 фев 2023
- BBC Radio 3
14 September 2010
Powell and Pressburger's 1944 film, set in the beautiful Kentish landscape largely unchanged since Chaucer's day, tells the stories of three war-time "pilgrims", each of whom travel to Canterbury and experience some radical change in their own lives while also beginning to see a glimmer of a post-war Britain very different from the one they left behind in 1939. Simon Heffer explores how, as the war drew to its close, the use of the English countryside in films became not just a powerful illustration of what Britain had been fighting to preserve, but also how, within that now safely preserved setting, attitudes, roles and mores could and would change. 
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I've just listened to this after having been very moved by the film. Strangely great and I'm sure I'll watch it again. History used to bore me when i was younger, dry, dusty, irrelevant: now I see it as a Trip, and to have feeling of connectness with the past is something which makes me feel at the same time placed, and timeless.
So glad I heard this. A Canterbury Tale is a very underrated film (as to this day are Powell and Pressburger, despite reverence amongst a small cohort of the film industry). The film has so much to say on so many levels and I think many people will come away from seeing it with a different perspective. It remains though, a fascinating snapshot of a time and place and juxtaposition with a time long gone. In that sense it's evocative of an England and englishness that I'm sure disappeared decades ago.
I love the town of CHILLINGBOURNE.
This was such a lovely movie
He missed the penance aspect of the Canterbury pilgrimage for Colpeper, the only one who regularly must appear there as part of his employment.
Yes, good spot - although as he knows he has been 'found out', the penance aspect is echoed further by that element of his journey too; so it should be clear to the viewer, yet it is strange that he didn't mention it in his essay.
I also wondered about a 'Moby Dick' parallel with Colpepper - he has the old English name for the Devil, and is the antagonist of the story. Like Ahab, who given most deliberately an 'evil' name by his mother and is obsessed to the point of wrongness by one focal object in his life, so Colpepper's incidental 'evil' naming (for surname is not chosen) also has a single burning focus in his life - and it is Old England itself and the continuation of its memory, folk & academic.
But that's just my thought.
@@AndrewGivens An astute observation Andrew.
Colpeper, usurped the role of God, judging and corralling the behavior of the young women of the village ; and consequently among the penitents is denied grace.