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In And Around A Canterbury Tale
First time I watched it was on TV. I'd been channel surfing and came in a few minutes late. John Sweet was waking up in his huge Elizabethan bed and then the little boy appeared at the window perched on top of the hay cart. I had no idea what I was seeing, but I knew it was amazing.
The summer skies piled high with cumulus, the white blossom in the orchards.
About ten years later I had a chance to see it in the cinema. I settled into my seat- and up came the opening titles and they were in colour. What the hell? It turned out the BFI had sent Pasolini's Canterbury Tales by mistake.
Shortly after that intensely frustrating experience it showed up on TV again. This time I was ready- and saw the amazing opening for the first time. The bells, the modernised Chaucer and the cod Chaucer, the medieval pilgrims riding across the North Downs, the falcon that turns into a spitfire...
It's my favourite movie. It's the one I'd snatch up and run with if the vault was on fire. Powell and Pressburger made an armful of great movies, but this is the most authentically strange, the loveliest, the most moving.
Last night, after watching it on the lap-top, I did some research. John Sweet died earlier this year. Sweet by name and sweet by nature is what everyone says. I'm glad he had such a long life. This is the only acting he ever did at this level. He's like Jimmy Stewart without the artifice.
Sheila Sim is lovely too. She's still alive. She's been Mrs and then Lady Attenborough for the last 60 odd years.
It seems the cameras never got inside the cathedral. Oh surely that can't be true? The light, the space, the acoustics, did they really manage to re-create all that at Denham? Apparently they did.
One of my favourite sequences is the one where the camera dollies through the bombed out streets of Canterbury East. Among the signs telling passers-by that such and such a business has moved to new premises is one I hadn't registered before that reads "Ancient Light". Was that already there or did Powell plant it? And If genuine what an earth did it mean?
Another thing I'd not noticed before: John Sweet's pal says tea is something you get used to- like marijuana; Sweet says he'll take the marijuana. I guess the censor was dozing at that point.
I'm sure that teashop is still there. Next time I'm in Canterbury I mean to go stand in the corner of the window where Sweet stood to watch the parade.
The summer skies piled high with cumulus, the white blossom in the orchards.
About ten years later I had a chance to see it in the cinema. I settled into my seat- and up came the opening titles and they were in colour. What the hell? It turned out the BFI had sent Pasolini's Canterbury Tales by mistake.
Shortly after that intensely frustrating experience it showed up on TV again. This time I was ready- and saw the amazing opening for the first time. The bells, the modernised Chaucer and the cod Chaucer, the medieval pilgrims riding across the North Downs, the falcon that turns into a spitfire...
It's my favourite movie. It's the one I'd snatch up and run with if the vault was on fire. Powell and Pressburger made an armful of great movies, but this is the most authentically strange, the loveliest, the most moving.
Last night, after watching it on the lap-top, I did some research. John Sweet died earlier this year. Sweet by name and sweet by nature is what everyone says. I'm glad he had such a long life. This is the only acting he ever did at this level. He's like Jimmy Stewart without the artifice.
Sheila Sim is lovely too. She's still alive. She's been Mrs and then Lady Attenborough for the last 60 odd years.
It seems the cameras never got inside the cathedral. Oh surely that can't be true? The light, the space, the acoustics, did they really manage to re-create all that at Denham? Apparently they did.
One of my favourite sequences is the one where the camera dollies through the bombed out streets of Canterbury East. Among the signs telling passers-by that such and such a business has moved to new premises is one I hadn't registered before that reads "Ancient Light". Was that already there or did Powell plant it? And If genuine what an earth did it mean?
Another thing I'd not noticed before: John Sweet's pal says tea is something you get used to- like marijuana; Sweet says he'll take the marijuana. I guess the censor was dozing at that point.
I'm sure that teashop is still there. Next time I'm in Canterbury I mean to go stand in the corner of the window where Sweet stood to watch the parade.
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I was at the University of Kent in the early 70s, my sister used to live in Bridge- and afterwards in Faversham, so I know the area quite well.
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I didn't realize he was gone; I'll miss him. He was lovely.
Eric Portman died long before I was born and I miss him. He will always look to me like Colpeper with his face like a cathedral statue, a speaking shadow in the projector's time-white light, a troubling and troubled trickster, the windblown genius of the fields.
Another thing I'd not noticed before: John Sweet's pal says tea is something you get used to- like marijuana; Sweet says he'll take the marijuana.
Yes; I love how casually that line is thrown in there.
I guess the censor was dozing at that point.
I think the censor was dozing through most of the film. I'm so glad.
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Yes. And Dionysos and Puck and no one but his own strange self. And everyone is by turns an angel.
I'm sure that teashop is still there. Next time I'm in Canterbury I mean to go stand in the corner of the window where Sweet stood to watch the parade.
A couple of years ago I rediscovered the six-day journal I'd kept during my high school choir and jazz band's trip to England and France in the spring of 1999. Most of it was embarrassingly painful, because I had never kept a diary before and had no idea how to do it (I spent a lot of time apologizing for the state of my handwriting), but it reminded me that I'd visited Canterbury. I'd forgotten that I'd ever written this:
I wish we had been able to stay in Canterbury longer. They were Roman ruins beneath some of the buildings, Roman roads beneath the modern streets. There was even a museum—underground, I believe, in a villa that had had the city built over it. Romans aside, I just liked the town. There were old buildings, interesting stores, churches faced with flint next to very modern concrete. (Canterbury was bombed very badly during WWII—made me think of "A Tale of Time City")—I just wanted to stay there.
We had just finished singing in the cathedral, which I recorded as the most unexpectedly profound experience of the trip (although Chartres had better stained glass. We got a tour from Malcolm Miller). I didn't know A Canterbury Tale existed then, but it was exactly what I wanted. And years later, without even knowing, I got it.
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One of those churches faced with flint- the one we see towards the end of the movie- gutted, but with its tower still standing- is where Kit Marlowe was baptised.
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(Anonymous) 2011-11-03 06:57 pm (UTC)(link)Jenny
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That is a ridiculously great room. In the DVD commentary, Ian Christie talks about how it's a bit unrealistically grand, but I guess that's part of the simultaneously idyllic and down to Earth quality the film has. When I was thinking of medieval bedrooms to use as models in my webcomic, that scene leaped to mind, even though it's, as you said, a bit later than medieval.
Sheila Sim is lovely too.
It's a great pleasure watching her in A Canterbury Tale.
It seems the cameras never got inside the cathedral. Oh surely that can't be true?
I believe they managed to sneak a camera in once for a shot of the ceiling, I'm not sure.
Ah, I just checked the commentary--a crewmember snuck in a camera and shot the ceiling "painstakingly . . . one frame at a time" for when Peter first enters--it becomes his POV shot. But looking at it now, the studio version of the cathedral really is remarkable--you can see where there's sort of proscenium foreground props and backgrounds of blown up photos, lit to make it work just right. It reminds me actually of how Michael Powell admired Disney movies as it seems similar to the effect Disney animated films used of layered images.
John Sweet's pal says tea is something you get used to- like marijuana; Sweet says he'll take the marijuana. I guess the censor was dozing at that point.
I wonder if it's in the American version of the film, which I understand is different in a number of ways. I wonder if it really was something the censors were touchy about--since marijuana had only been made illegal in the U.S. somewhat recently (1937), maybe it just seemed an acceptable way of contrasting English and American culture. I could be wrong, but I don't think marijuana quite got its infamy until the 1950s.
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The American cut is 20 minutes shorter and has framing sequences featuring Kim Hunter as Sweet's girlfriend/wife. I've not seen it- and I'm not sure I want to- but it would be interesting to know what exactly was cut. I think you're probably right about the demonization of marijuana. In 1944 that reference was probably no more than a little cheeky.
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There's clips of it on the Criterion DVD, and I haven't wanted to watch it, either. I'm rather glad the British version has become the circulated version in America, too.
There's shot of the West end of the nave, with people in it- you see the whole thing from floor to ceiling; it's very hard to see how that could have been faked.
Do you mean this shot?
Ian Christie confirms this was in studio. He even speculates that the presence of the cleaning woman was some kind of dig at the cathedral authorities, but that seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
It really is an impressive process shot, but really examining it, I can tell it is a process shot. But maybe it's no surprise the Archers would be so good at doing this when they were even able to do impressive process shots in a colour film, though I guess a lot of those shots in The Red Shoes didn't, and weren't supposed to, look entirely real.
Apparently the stain glass windows were removed during the war, as can be seen from the exterior shots, and replaced with asbestos;
Ian Christie speculates that getting actual footage from inside might have actually been less impressive because of this.
Apparently the studio footage fooled a lot of people. According to Christie;
Powell used to love telling the story of how when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Kent, awarded at a ceremony in the cathedral, one of the church's officials congratulated him on the filming of the church's interior.
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