A Canterbury Tale

During World War II, an American GI tries to understand English character and customs and winds up falling in love., Drama set in a small Kent village during World War II. A man takes it upon himself to pour glue into local girls’ hair during blackouts if he sees them dating GIs. His identity is discovered by a visiting land-girl from London, a British tank sergeant and a GI, who all experience a minor miracle., One of the most puzzling and offbeat movies to come out of World War II was A Canterbury Tale, a bizarre adaptation of the famous long poem by 14th century English author Geoffrey Chaucer. Made in 1944 and set in the Nazi-threatened Britain of those years, the film centers on a British soldier, an American soldier, and a female shopkeeper in wartime Britain who journey to the Canterbury Cathedral and find their lives changed by the trip. Extremely unusual cinematic techniques and plotting are the mark of the directorial-screenwriting team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A Canterbury Tale was one of their many collaborative efforts, which included The Forty-Ninth Parallel, The Red Shoes, and such wry World War II comedy-dramas as Stairway To Heaven. A Canterbury Tale skewers British authorities and uses a real American GI (Bob Johnson) in one of its lead roles. It met with criticism in Britain but was hailed in the United States, though most American audiences saw an inferior, shortened version., “A Canterbury Tale” is not a sermon-it is a story about an old custom. Over five hundred years ago Chaucer wrote his poems about the pilgrims he saw making their way to St Thomas-A-Beckett’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral, where they went to seek a blessing or to do penance. Through the stories of four modern pilgrims we see that the tradition and spirit of “A CanterburyTale” is unchanged., Three strangers – a GI, an English conscript and a London girl sent down to work on the land – meet on the road to Canterbury. There they are drawn into a local mystery: young women who stay out late with soldiers are attacked by a ‘glueman’ who pours glue on their hair.