A Canterbury Tale begins with a reading of the prologue from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as pilgrims travel to the city, but this is not an adaptation. Six hundreds years pass by in a cut as the flight of a falcon becomes an airplane and the falconer becomes a British soldier of 1943 as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger tell the story of different pilgrims.

Alison Smith is a Land Girl, one of the many women who volunteered, others later drafted, to do the agriculture work while the men were away at war. Her boyfriend was a pilot shot down by enemy fire. British Sergeant Peter Gibbs is a trained musician who before the war could only get a job playing an organ in the cinemas. American Sergeant Bob Johnson, a congenial fellow from Oregon, is doing a little sightseeing and enjoys watching movies. He is disappointed that he hasn’t heard from his girl in seven weeks.
While these characters travel to Canterbury for different purposes than Chaucer’s pilgrims, they receive blessings their counterparts sought.

They all meet one evening when Johnson, who is headed to Canterbury, gets off one stop too early at the wrong station in the town of Chillingbourne. Since it was the last train of the night, he has to wait until morning. Gibbs disembarked to meet up with his regiment. At the request of the station master, they accompany Smith to town hall because women aren’t allowed to travel unaccompanied at night by order of the town’s magistrate, Mr. Colpeper.

On their way, a man jumps out of the shadows, pours some liquid on Smith’s head, and runs off into the night. At town hall, the substance is revealed to be glue and Smith is the latest victim of the glue man. There doesn’t appear to be a great urgency to catch the glue man, so the newly arrived trio work to solve the mystery.

A Canterbury Tale is a very intriguing film that I found my thoughts constantly returning to. It’s part war drama, yet it never deals with the enemy. It’s part whodunit, yet there’s not much mystery to the villain’s identity. Ultimately, it’s a spiritual film that deals more with characters than plot as Powell pays tribute to the pastoral way of life from his youth that was in danger of being lost due to the war.

The most compelling character is Colpeper, who is an angelic figure. As the town magistrate he sits in judgment. Even though his methods are questionable, he works to better the lives of the townspeople and soldiers, such as his lectures about the countryside. Rather than entering or leaving the frame, he mysteriously appears and disappears in some scenes. While sitting in a beautiful field, Colpeper tells Smith, “Pilgrims to Canterbury often receive blessings.” Seemingly a nice sentiment that turns out to be a prophecy fulfilled.