FYI: I’m now a writer at the brand new site Movie Mezzanine, and I’ve started an annals-of-film-history column there called “Looking Back.” The first movie under discussion? Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), which deals sensitively with love and land and locating yourself in history. You can read about it here.
Had I more time, I would’ve delved into a few other aspects of the film. (It’s so rich and digressive; I’ll be revisiting it for years hence.) For example: Eric Portman’s performance as local authority Colpeper, which demonstrates much of the same ambiguous, low-key villainy that Portman brought to Powell and Pressburger’s 49th Parallel a few years earlier. He creates a fascinating character in Colpeper and seriously complicates the film’s relationship with England’s distant past.
Further points of interest: the film’s visual style, which makes special use of both the undulating landscape and the faces of its stars shot in mesmerizing close-up. And then the ending, in which a soldier from London gets to play some “Toccata and Fugue” on the organ of Canterbury Cathedral and feel music, religion, and war converge along his fingertips. It’s an unconventional climax, but a powerful one, which I suppose could double as a description of the whole film.
