It is a very odd film, isn't it? I always get more emotionally bound up in it than is comfortable and I don't really know why. I wish I didn't. Very unsettling in a downplayed English sort of way. I watched it again the other night after you had mentioned it, Ted, and it just seems odder and odder on every viewing.

Quite apart from anything else it contains in the last twenty minutes or so some extraordinary documentary evidence of the aftermath of the 1942 bombing of Canterbury which has particular personal resonances. For those who haven't seen it, it is a strange wartime story which turns on some night time incidents in a Kent village on the Pilgrims Way in which girls' hair is covered in glue by an unknown assailant. Yes, just quietly and unassumingly bonkers.     

I always thought that Whistle Down the Wind was a good film John Mills was'nt it with his daughter as the child, Hayley?

Saw 'the Other Bolyne Girl', last night'. I always think that when film directors glean from books, they should do it in such a way that would be a bit more faithful. I suppose artistic licience could operate here, but when it barely touches the surface of what the book was about, the director, I feel, should not have made the film.

NB See what the cat was up to during the film in 9 out 10 cats Prefer thread!!

 Not sure I agree about the "Christian" aspect of the film, George,  rather pagan if anything I'd have thought. Its concern with place, history and the soil and the central aspect of spells as either a warning to be aware  of the "foreign" or as a source of communal cleansing and binding seems to implythe primitive. Porter's character, by opening up Price's true potential and giving the American an insight into British values and vitures rather suggests to me a Sarastrian figure.
 Love "Closely Observed Trains" to the extent that it is the only film for which I have the screen-play.

It's a fascinating and very sinister film; I've heard someone suggest that it anticipates aspects of Peeping Tom.

Anyone know if it was based on a real incident (or similar one)?

  Oops!   My posting was made on a mere hunch before I'd read Ian Pace's contribution.

  George, do try and locate Michael Powell's two hefty autobiographies:  'A Life In The Movies' (1986) and 'Million Dollar Movie' (1992); they used to be remaindered (at last - a title for my memoirs) in Drummond's bookshop (east side of Charing X Rd, a few yards up from Solosy's newsagents, Leic Sq tube entrance).

  I used to have lunch with John Laurie (the Dad's Army heyday) at the BBC canteen in the rehearsal block at North Acton.    John made several films with Powell and I only had to give him the Micky Powell cue for John to hold court for the next half hour as I ate.   Powell had a fiery temperament and often had to be counselled by the gentle Emeric Pressburger.   Endless clashes with the 'Establishment', particularly over 'Col Blimp' (1943), but his obstinacy enraged the press when he got special permission to travel to Canada with cast and crew for location work on "49th Parallel" (1941) at a time of huge losses by submarine activity in the Atlantic.       John - broad Scots to another Scot -  "Stanley, he wiz a right wimminiser; aye nippin' aff for a tryst, somewhere."      John was enraged to lose a leading role (Ebenezer?) in yet another version of 'Kidnapped'.   I asked who got it.      "Him, him - that bald heeded sadist in the cage.   Y'see, Ebenezer is plain mean but nae a sadist.   'D'y nae want your porridge?, I'll hae't.  Just mean."     Of course, he meant Donald Pleasance who was playing the role of Eichmann in Robert Shaw's play, "Man In The Glass Cage" at the time.

Anyhow, I've just had a shufti at Vol 1, in the garden.    Spent two hours, this morning, reading Ingmar Bergman's biography 'The Magic Lantern' (1988) after sitting enthralled, again, watching "The Seventh Seal" (1957); more, anon, when I get my head round my conclusions.  Deeply satisfying to fall in love with the cinema again.

Powell, as usual, writes extensively about the making of "A Canterbury Tale" (1943) but sidesteps on its sinister implications.   He liked the naming of the hair gluer as Thomas Colpepper and described him as 'loopy' before back-peddling on the character.   Originally, Deborah Kerr (MP was having a torrid love affair with her at the time) was slated for the land -girl and he hoped to cast Roger Livesey as Colpepper - both Kerr and Livesey had scored well in 'Col Blimp', on release at the time - but Livesey declined, he found the role 'distasteful' and Kerr opted for Alex Korda's 'Perfect Strangers' with Robert Donat.  Eric Portman was cast as Colpepper.    MP writes, "He gave an extraordinarily perceptive performance.  His Colpepper had the face of a medieval ascetic, which could quite easily have been torn out of a monkish manuscript."  1943 was a difficult period for location shooting in Kent as the whole of southern England had started preparations for D-Day in 1944.   Indeed, the Chief Constable of Kent refused permission for Emeric Pressburger to attend location filming as Kent was an area prohibited to enemy aliens.   Powell writes affectionately about 'the natural talent of Sgt John Sweet' who was seconded from his American unit to play the narrator.   He continues:
   
       "The theme of A Canterbury Tale has grown organically in our minds, but it was not
       understood, or even enjoyed, until some thirty-odd years later.    When we made the
       film, in the summer and autumn of 1943, the theme seemed to us an important one.
       49th Parallel told the Americans that we were fighting their war as well as ours.  In
       1941 with One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, we had told the world that Europe would never
       be conquered.   In 1942, with Colonel Blimp, we had said that Britain would never be
       conquered.     In 1943, with A Canterbury Tale, we were explaining to the Americans,
       and to our own people, the spiritual values and the traditions we were fighting for.

       To say what we had to say, we invented the character of an American soldier who was
       training in England for D-Day.   In this way, he would encounter the English with all their
       prides and prejudices.     I don't know which of us used the phrase "a modern pilgrim"
       but I am certain it was I, who had walked the Pilgrims' Way many times, who had suggested
       that he should be a pilgrim to Canterbury, and with a nod to Chaucer we proposed to call the
       film A Canterbury Tale.

       I had never made a film in the orchards and chesnut woods of East Kent, where I was born,
       and I couldn't resist it.   Could I have some scenes with Chaucer's 14th century pilgrims,
       I enquired: the Knight with the falcon on his wrist, the Friar, the bawdy Wife of Bath...
       and suddenly in Emeric's agile mind the Knight's falcon soared into the air and turned
       into a Spitfire.    Modern characters crowded in on us, pleading to be noticed and used.
       There was a loony English squire, who was so anxious to preserve Britain's traditional
       virtues that he poured glue on girls' hair when they went out at night with soldiers. 
       This traditionalist had to be given a good old English name, and we called him
       Thomas Colpepper.   The modern pilgrims to Canterbury were three: a young British soldier,
       in civilian life a cinema organist, a virtuoso on the Wurlitzer, who combined ruthless
       materialism with sensitive musicianship; an observant young American soldier from a lumber
       town in Oregon; a young land-girl, one of the Women's Corps mobilised to take over fighting
       men's jobs on the farm, and who is trying to forget a tragic love affair.   The rest of the
       characters all marched solidly onto the screen.   Didn't I know them well?   Hadn't I
       heard them talking and seen them working when I was a child?   Wasn't every lane around
       Canterbury and every stone in Canterbury itself familiar to me? ......

       A Canterbury Tale looked on the surface conventional, but it was filled with subversive material.
       Emeric's story, worthy of Maupassant, was too Continental for Rank and Davis.   But we were
       so sublimely confident, so sure of ourselves, that nobody dared say out loud what they
       were thinking, and they obediently put up the money for it......"

  Phew!     Another Knight confronting Death in "The Seventh Seal" last night and further thoughts on our own heritage today.       
       
       
       

 Thank you, martle.           Yes, indeed, I am joking but "Remaindered" could be a good title if I do scribble a few jottings in the future.     Do enjoy your holiday break.