A Canterbury Tale (1944)
Directed by Michael Powell
Three modern-day pilgrims investigate a bizarre crime in a small town while on their way to Canterbury.
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What critics compared A Canterbury Tale to
The duo's " The Red Shoes ," " I Know Where I'm Going! ," " A Canterbury Tale " and so many more were examples of what Powell called "the composed film," a movie in which each element was worked out to meticulously mesh with the other, a movie in which all of the art forms that inform movies -- painting, music, theater, sculpture, the whole lot -- are brought to bear with equal emphasis, a movie in which the contours of the real and the fantastic rub freely against each other to produce ... well, hopefully a kind of aesthetic alchemy.
Setting such immediate comparisons to one side, it must be admitted that Michael Powell's new film appears to be part of a logical progression from the straightforward brutalities of 49th Parallel through the more sophisticated activities of the Eric Portman character in A Canterbury Tale who was given to putting glue into the hair of Kentish maidens, and through the disagreeable final scenes of The Red Shoes.
The writer-director team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ("Peeping Tom"/"Red Shoes") have come up with a simple but wonderfully bizarre way to tell Chaucer's A Canterbury Tale in modern terms using the English countryside of Kent to frame a story around four diverse characters during WWII finding each has a miracle occur to them when they reach Canterbury.