Kind Hearts and Coronets (UK, 1949)
Directed by Robert Hamer
Starring Dennis Price, Alec Guinness, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood

Since the brand was revived several years ago, Ealing Studios have developed a reputation for quaintness. With the exception of John Landis' underrated Burke and Hare, the majority of the new Ealing's output has been frothy, often retrograde films designed solely for the export market. How easily we forget that the self-same studio once produced some of the darkest, edgiest and blackest comedies the world had ever seen. And there is no better example of this than Kind Hearts and Coronets, which takes pride of place with The Red Shoes as one of the finest British films of the 1940s.Describing any old film as 'edgy' comes with problems. Changes in social attitudes since the 1940s means that, on one level, filmmakers are now able to show a wider range of subjects to a greater extent than ever before. Under this line of argument, what was once considered edgy, radical or insightful now looks timid and tame. But even if we accept this as a general rule, Kind Hearts and Coronets still stands as a proud and intriguing exception. Like Peeping Tom eleven years later, it has retained its emotional impact even after its aesthetic achievements have been surpassed.Kind Hearts and Coronets is a comedy about a serial killer, at a time when the vast majority of films involving murder sought to completely demonise the assailant in question. More than that, it is about a serial killer who vengefully targets the aristocracy, who while waning in power still held a great deal of influence in government and high society. The film is a vitriolic attack on the British class system, thinly disguised as an erudite comedy of manners. To paraphrase Macbeth, it may look like the innocent flower, but it is most definitely the serpent under it, and its venom is ruthless and bitter.In a further comparison to Peeping Tom, the film had a rocky ride with the censors when first released. Sir Michael Balcon, then-head of Ealing, sought to distance himself from the film, believing that the public could not handle its ironic treatment of the subject matter. In line with the restrictive Hays Code, the American distributors requested that Robert Hamer added a ten-second epilogue, to show Louis Mazzini getting his comeuppance in a way while the original ending only implied. While Alec Guinness went on to win an Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai, neither Dennis Price nor Robert Hamer would ever reach this level of success again. Film critic David Thompson described the latter's fortunes as "the most serious miscarriage of talent in post-war British cinema".Many of the classic Ealing comedies used present events to satirise the past and vice versa. Passport to Pimlico satirised both the Berlin airlift and the exile of the Dutch monarchy to Canada, while some commentators have argued that The Ladykillers is a send-up of the post-war Labour government. Kind Hearts and Coronets was made in the year of the Second Parliament Act, which further curbed the power of the House of Lords and with it the aristocracy. The real-life political attack on landed wealth is contrasted with the lethal attacks of Louis Mazzini, with the aristocracy being 'killed off' in both cases.Kind Hearts and Coronets has a very poisonous view of the British class system, and in particular of the aristocracy's attempts to justify its position. While marrying out of love may have brought Mazzini's mother poverty, marrying for wealth and "good breeding stock" brings nothing but misery. Whatever diversions the D'Ascoynes may pursue (the navy, photography, the church, hunting) there are a universally inward-looking bunch, with little time for anyone whose interests or backgrounds are not identical to their own.Although Mazzini is of noble blood, his training as a draper, shop assistant and bank clerk gives him a middle-class status, something which simultaneously repulses and pleases him because it serves as the perfect cover for his crimes. The closer he comes to his goal of becoming Duke of Chalfont, the more he takes on the characteristics of a D'Ascoyne, shunning his childhood sweetheart Sibella (Joan Greenwood) and refusing to help Lionel in his hour of need. The film brutally depicts the entrenched arrogance of the British elites, something which has persisted longer after the D'Ascoynes of this world have withered away.Dennis Price, who had previously found fame in Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, is absolutely extraordinary in the lead role. Having been aptly described as "sourly handsome", he presents Louis Mazzini as a man of immense class and sophistication, but who is also capable of being cold, dismissive, callous and sociopathic. Price was always self-deprecating about his acting abilities, describing himself as "second-rate" and "lacking the essential spark." But whatever else happened in his career, this performance is enough to dismiss all such deprecation.What makes his performance so interesting is that, for a lot of the time, Price doesn't speak. The prolific use of voiceover gives his performance a silent movie quality - not because his movements are exaggerated, but because his facial expressions and posture play a bigger part in his characterisation. Normally this amount of voiceover could quickly become tedious, but here it works brilliantly, taking us behind Mazzini's mask of dignity. It makes his deadpan expression all the more funny, as the most unspeakable things are uttered without the merest twitch of his lips. It is as though we were inside the mind of a killer, hearing his darkest deeds completely uncensored and without any license on the part of the screenwriter.Kind Hearts and Coronets' themes of love and class are also expressed in Mazzini's relationships with women. For most of the film he is taken with Sibella, who marries Lionel but confides in Louis due to their friendship as children, and increasingly out of desperation as just how boring her husband is. Louis strings Sibella along, playing with her heart strings and being glad to kiss her while knowing he can never bring himself to be with her. This is a further example of Louis' corruption as he grows closer to his goal, becoming as cold and as haughty as the people who caused him to swear revenge.If Sibella is the proud plaything who is ultimately beneath his stature, Edith (Valerie Hobson) provides the security of wealth and the moral backbone Louis needs. Their initial meeting, while her husband is still alive, indicates that such a marriage would not be any fun: her strong religious conviction forbids drinking, leading her husband to keep gin and whisky in his dark room. Much of the film plays out like a bedroom farce as Louis tries to keep the two women from ever meeting. In the final scene, he has to choose between dull security and loving disgrace, quoting from The Beggar's Opera as he struggles to make up his mind.The humour in Kind Hearts and Coronets is as black as can be, with multiple jokes about hanging and all the murders having a comedic quality. These range from the general being blown up as he opens the caviar, to the admiral mistaking port for starboard and sinking his ship, and finally Mazzini's employer dying of shock after inheriting the title. There are dozens of laugh-out-loud moments, such as Mazzini's comments after shooting down Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne: "I shot an arrow through the air; she fell to earth in Berkeley Square." But a lot of the time the film is so edgy and so forthright that you're almost afraid to laugh: the barb is so strong that to laugh is almost too easy a response.The film is most popularly remembered for Alec Guinness, who plays all eight members of the D'Ascoyne family. He was originally only offered four roles, but pressed Hamer to cast him in all eight after reading the script. Suffice to say, he's magnificent, with each family member having clearly developed character traits and quirks, and each looking hilariously pompous in all that make-up. The split-screen shooting used to put all eight characters on screen is utterly seamless, and Hamer's direction is totally first-rate.Kind Hearts and Coronets is a perfect black comedy, which is as funny as Monty Python and the Holy Grail and as artistically accomplished as the best work of Powell and Pressburger. The performances are all superb, particularly from Guinness and Price, and Robert Hamer's direction gives the film a note-perfect pace so that all the jokes hit the spot. Over 60 years since it took the world by storm, it remains the darkest, edgiest and funniest of the classic Ealing comedies, and will be reducing generations to fits of laughter for years to come.

Rating:
Verdict: A perfect black comedy

Black Narcissus (UK, 1947)
Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Starring Deborah Kerr, Roger Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Sabu

The two worst devices in film criticism are nostalgia and the arrogance of youth. On the one hand it is foolish to assume that all films from the past have a natural superiority over those made today, just as it is foolish to say that a hand-written letter is entirely superior to e-mail. On the other hand, in an age where almost anything can be said or done legally on screen, it is stupid to assume that a film like Black Narcissus doesn't still hold up.At first glance, Black Narcissus would seem like a lot of other melodramas released around the Second World War: emotionally shallow, overly simple, badly constructed and ultimately dull. But after its off-putting theatrical opening, the film quickly begins to defy our expectations and serves up a lot more in the way of both style and substance. What starts off shakily ends up as a brilliantly gripping, intense psychological thriller with great performance and stunning expressionist visuals.To give credit to the cynics, the opening ten minutes are a little uneven. Their style is much more quirky and offbeat than we would expect from Powell and Pressburger, even considering the level of quaintness in A Canterbury Tale. May Hallatt's role as the elderly caretaker is very off-balance in both her performance and its surroundings. The opening is also laden with exposition, and as the camera lingers on the luxurious décor of this former seraglio, we struggle to engage with our surroundings for more than a few moments.

Once the nuns arrive, however, the film takes off and you forgive all its subsequent quirks of fate. The film is a visual delight, with Jack Cardiff's Oscar-winning cinematography bringing real character to both the costumes and the architecture. Most Technicolor films are praised for how bright their primary colours are, but in Black Narcissus what sticks with you is the white on screen, from the shimmering robes of the nuns to the pale walls of the convent and the flickering candles in between. The production design is so effective that you soon forget that all of this was shoot at Pinewood Studios, and all the vistas of the Himalayas are either murals or matte paintings.Black Narcissus is an intriguing exploration of sexual repression, made intriguing by its relative subtlety and understatement. Some of this is down to the context in which the film was made; even though Powell considered it "his most erotic movie", there is no open consummation of love or lust, and if such scenes had been attempted they would never have got passed the censors. But most of it is down to Powell's brilliant camerawork and Pressburger's slow-burning script. The camera is fixed on the nuns' faces to reveal every little twitch or slight smile that reveal more than words ever could.The film explores sexual repression through a number of interesting opposites. The most obvious of these is the relationship between Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) and Mr. Dean (Roger Farrar). The camera treats these two characters very differently: when Clodagh is in shot, the camera focuses on her face and she is never seen out of her habit, to show her purity and resilience. With Mr. Dean, on the other hand, we get to see a whole lot more: there are many wide shots of him stomping around in short shorts, and at least one close-up on his hairy chest. Farrar is the antithesis of everything Clodagh stand for - wild at heart, uncouth, unkempt, and massively attractive.Under these circumstances, the easy thing would be to focus solely on the rivalry between these two characters and end up with Sister Clodagh resigning from the order to be with him. But Pressburger is too clever to let that happen, and instead the story plays out like a duel of principles with the prize being right rather than being in love. Both Dean and Clodagh are established as intelligent, determined and resourceful characters whose conflict comes primarily from a conflict of opinion rather than a botched desire to suppress Freudian urges.

As the plot develops and Sister Ruth becomes a more prominent character, we begin to understand the intelligence behind this decision. For most of the film in which Sister Ruth plays no massive part, we are led to believe that Dean is an obstacle to the nuns' success, someone whose disregard for their religion and way of life threatens both the success of the convent and the purity of their order. But once we discover Ruth's fate, we realise that the source of evil or temptation was not so much Dean as the nuns' perception of him. In the eyes of the film, temptation is not something that comes from 'out there', beyond the safety of Christian walls. It is inside of all of us, and more often than not we drive ourselves to give into it.If we think of Black Narcissus as a version of Adam and Eve, that helps to illuminate its spiritual and psychological theses. At the beginning we believe that the convent is like Eden, a safe, perfect place surrounded by a strange land, and with Dean as the serpent who enters the Garden bringing temptation with him. But after we see what has happened to Ruth, the story departs from this in one of two ways. Either we are still seeing a Christian myth play out, but with more emphasis on perception and delusion than on physical evil. Or what we are seeing is something more humanist, where the evil is simply the torment of opposites coming together under one roof.

The key scene in Black Narcissus comes when Sister Clodagh stumbles into a room and finds Sister Ruth wearing a dress and red lipstick, looking immensely proud and increasingly wanton. Here we have opposing depictions of womanhood: one is intensely sexual to the point of madness, the other pure and virginal but also naïve. Both Clodagh and Ruth are driven by a kind of faith - Clodagh by her belief in God and her need to prove herself, and Ruth by her belief that Dean loves her and that no-one must stand in her way. When Dean spurns her, shouting "I don't love anyone!", it is as much a loss of faith as Clodagh's departure, if not moreso.Fantasy plays a prominent part in Black Narcissus. Throughout the story we see flashback to Clodagh's youth in Ireland, and slowly realise her motivation behind becoming a nun. She remembers the man she loved through objects; the emeralds worn by the general's son remind her of those given to her for her wedding day which never took place. These scenes were banned when the film was first released, presumably because of its insinuation that nuns were simply failed lovers, women who didn't measure up to the men of this world. And then we have the ending, which takes us straight to the heart of expressionist horror. The way in which the screen turns red as Sister Ruth faints, or the terrifying close-ups of her eyes, foreshadow the great work of Dario Argento in Suspiria.The film also has a strong but subtle political elements. The film was released around the time of India's independence from Britain, and its final scenes have been interpreted as Britain trying to make a dignified exit from a land it could neither control nor understand. The culture clash between different religions (in this case Christianity and Hinduism) is played out very subtly, and foreshadows the more frightening and hysterical clashes in The Devils and The Wicker Man. Crucially, the film doesn't fall into the imperialist trap of portraying the British as wholly rational and the 'natives' as overtly savage. As the nuns start to disintegrate and more intelligent Indian characters come forward, such accusations become redundant.Black Narcissus is a great effort from Powell and Pressburger which is almost up there with The Red Shoes. The performances are superb, with Deborah Kerr managing to seem composed and conflicted simultaneously and Kathleen Byron scaring us to death as Sister Ruth. The film remains visually astounding, the script is subtle even in its maddest moments, and there is enough tension and brains bubbling beneath the surface to keep anyone enthralled. A hugely compelling piece and a must-see for thriller fans.

Rating: 4.5/5
Verdict: Smart, sexy and scintillating

I Know Where I'm Going! (UK, 1945)
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Starring Wendy Hiller, Roger Lively, Pamela Brown, Finlay Currie

Romantic drama is a hard genre to get right, both on paper and on screen. Some are so light and frothy that they leave no lasting impression; others, like The Snows of Kilimanjaro, are overblown, overwrought and in most cases over-long. I Know Where I'm Going! is a textbook example of how to do this sort of film properly, taking a relatively simple story and making it memorable through a series of strong performances, a great script and remarkable direction.One of the common criticisms laid against romantic films, whether dramatic or comedic, is that they lack substance, relying on the charm of the performers to take an audience's mind off a highly clichéd or conventional premise. But while that criticism may carry a certain weight with regard to more recent rom-coms, it can't be fairly levelled against I Know Where I'm Going!. This is not because of the film's age, or its positioning in the golden age of melodramas. It is instead because the film is subtly inventive, adding precious moments of surprise in its every twist and turn.

I Know Where I'm Going! begins with a woman setting off to marry the man of her dreams, who is rich, powerful, influential and lives in the magical land of Scotland. These early scenes, with Wendy Hiller in full-on daddy's-little-girl mode, explore the age-old desire of young girls to be princesses and ride off into the sunset with a handsome prince. The twist, however, is that Joan Webster is not your average girly princess: she is a driven, ambitious woman who has known what she has wanted all her life. The opening credits explore her childhood in the manner of a BBC newsreel, showing a series of clear turning points underscored by Home Service narration.If the character of Joan Webster were to turn up in a film today, she would most likely be characterised as having OCD or some form of neurosis. Perhaps she would have been a suitable soul-mate for Jack Nicholson at the start of As Good As It Gets. She has her entire life planned out meticulously, knowing exactly what and who she wants and how she intends to get it. Her constant desire to get to the island comes as much from her compulsive urge to be punctual as the desire to meet the man she is marrying.

For the first ten minutes the film confronts this idea in a very broad, head-on way. We see Wendy Hiller in the railway carriage pouring over her routine, behaving in a very controlled and restrained manner. But for the rest of the film Emeric Pressburger's script explores her character and surroundings much more subtly. Superficially, the story of I Know Where I'm Going! seems very predictable - put simply, there's not that many men on the island. But the film plays out economically and keeps its emotions and dialogue in check, giving us a number of pleasant surprises along the way.The film is very good at planting seeds of doubt in Webster's mind, and demonstrating her infuriation at seeing her planned perfection disrupted. These disruptions start off very small, with her oversleeping and having to carry her clothes off the train in a heap. As the weather delays her trip to Kiloran, she slowly but surely begins to adjust to the landscape, even if she doesn't find herself warming to the place until the final reel. When she finally hears her fiancée on the radio, she assumes there is something wrong with his voice and asks him if he has a cold. These little moments don't seem like much when they first play out, but as the plot unfolds their significance becomes clear.Like many of their other films, I Know Where I'm Going! sees Powell and Pressburger dabbling in fantasy and applying magic to an otherwise realistic setting. These dabbles begin on the train to Glasgow, when Webster is sleeping with her wedding dress hanging in a see-through case above her. Suddenly the dress disappears and we move into her fantasy of being married - albeit jokingly, since she is being married to her fiancée's company, thanks to her father's confusion. Later in the same scene we see the train passing through tunnels made of tartan while the narrator whispers the chorus to 'The Bonnie Banks o'Loch Lomond'.

The film draws on a number of mythical elements which give depth and credibility to the situation. These range from the Laird's story about the Viking ship which anchored in the whirlpool Corryvreckan, to the practice of counting the beams and making a wish on the first night spent in a new room. To some extent these follow in the tradition started by Sir Walter Scott and carried on in Brigadoon, since they paint a fanciful portrait of the Highlands and Outer Hebrides. But the film is not entirely a tourists'-eye-view, and is populated with enough believable supporting characters to stop things drifting too far into fantasy.Although it seems an odd comparison, the story of I Know Where I'm Going! is not all that far removed from that of The Wicker Man nearly 30 years later. Both films centre on an individual who comes to a remote Scottish community driven by a singular urge to find someone. Both Joan Webster and Sergeant Howie are outsiders in this community and cannot comprehend its way of life - although the former doesn't have to put up with pagan worship or naked dancing. The central similarity, however, is that the goal of their respective characters is essentially a McGuffin. Just as the girl in The Wicker Man never really went missing, so we never meet Lord Beringer, or get to count his money. He might as well not exist, for his only function is to bring her to the island, and the weather does the rest in managing to keep her there.The mythical elements of the film are ultimately what lift it out of being predictable fare. The stories which Torquil regales to his guests include a tale about a rope being made of virginal hair which would never break, since true love is stronger than anything. The sub-plot surrounding the curse gives his character a sense of mystery, so that we enjoy their relationship while picking our brain as to what this curse could be. One of the best scenes in the film sees Torquil and Webster arguing on the stairs about the local customs and the latter's decision to go out in a gale to get to the island. When our leads do finally get together, their entanglement with the curse makes it seem a whole lot less contrived, while raising the question of whether their love was chance intervening on fate or fate playing out in a different way than they had intended.I Know Where I'm Going! has impressive production values for a film of its time and budget. The storm scenes, where the boat flounders and drifts into a whirlpool, are impressively executed. You do feel like you are in the boat with the characters, with the spray soaking your face and the boat lurching one way and then the other. Capturing the whirlpool and the boat involved a lot of complicated editing, with multiple location long-shots being spliced together with model shots and studio shoots in which the cast were doused in buckets of icy water. All Powell's efforts pay off, creating a storm sequence which is gripping and inventive.

The performances are also of a high calibre. Wendy Hiller is on great form as Joan Webster, nailing the character in the very first scene and displaying the same formidable femininity that would serve her well in The Elephant Man. Roger Livesey is a great match for her, combining humour, humility and a deep-seated integrity (plus he looks good in a kilt). Among the supporting cast, real-life Captain C. W. R. Wright is a well-chosen Colonel Barnstaple, and Valentine Dyall turns up in a rare non-villainous performance as Mr. Robinson.I Know Where I'm Going! is a top-notch romantic drama which is understated but ambitious and whose ideas remain fresh and engaging even after 65 years. The performances are charming and convincing, and really bring Pressburger's myth-injected script to life. It isn't quite the masterpiece that Martin Scorsese had claimed it to be, since its quirkier sections are occasionally overbearing (tea with the Robinsons, for example). But it marks a definite improvement on A Canterbury Tale and the start of the prime years of Powell and Pressburger's careers.

Rating: 4.5/5
Verdict: A properly magical love story

A Canterbury Tale (UK, 1944)
Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Starring Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price, John Sweet

The early works of Powell and Pressburger are tainted by their links with the Ministry of Information. Regardless of their merits at the time, 49th Parallel and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing are little more than well-made propaganda, designed to pull the Americans into the war. It was only as the tide turned and the need for such propaganda abated that the duo began to embark upon their truly great works.A Canterbury Tale is a 'hangover point' in the duo's history: it contains remnants of their propaganda era in both its characters and its intentions, but it also represents something of a departure. There is a great deal more affection at work, both in Pressburger's screenplay which celebrates all that is English and Powell's direction which has moments of pure inspiration. While not their best work by quite some distance, there is much about A Canterbury Tale that is both enjoyable and admirable.

Like most of Powell and Pressburger's work, A Canterbury Tale takes place in a universe where fantasy and reality are constantly intertwined. Its mise-en-scene, to use a pretentious term, is an interesting blend of English realism in the manner of David Lean and the German expressionism of Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. There are no dazzling transitions from one to the other like in The Red Shoes, but the film will often catch you unawares as it dips in and out of its expressionist elements. These are most noticeable in the scenes around Chillingbourne station, with their prominent shadows and exaggerated characters like the village idiot (more on him later).But centrally, A Canterbury Tale is a film about the various links between past and present, and how it is important, if not vital, that these links should be maintained. There is a recurring line of "before the war came", as if our characters somehow feel that everything that went before is irrelevant. Ms. Smith certainly has no desire to return to the London shop from where she started. But as the film wears on we begin to recognise the value of the past, both in the internal development of the characters and in the external actions surrounding the Glue Man's crimes.

The film retells Chaucer's classic tale fairly loosely, with our travellers to Canterbury as modern pilgrims and Mr. Colpeper as the village squire, whose influence extends far beyond his official office. Much is made of the village's heritage and its place in history, being situated on the 'pilgrim's road' which goes straight to Canterbury Cathedral. There is a brilliant shot at the beginning where a mediaeval traveller releases a hawk into the air: it flattens its wings, before we cut to a shot of an aeroplane swooping down, and the traveller is replaced with a soldier. This is a magical moment, showing how the world has changed while situating this change in a landscape which still familiar. It is also a clear influence on the animations in Pink Floyd - The Wall, in which a dove is torn open to eventually form a bomber.The mystery elements of A Canterbury Tale sit very oddly. It's the kind of story that Alfred Hitchcock would have loathed, partly because of his distaste for whodunits, but because there is little or no means to cultivate suspense. And even as whodunits go, the Glue Man's is story incredibly straightforward. We don't even need a scene at the beginning revealing who he is, because we eliminate the other characters so quickly.As an abstract thriller, then, A Canterbury Tale doesn't work. But the film manages to get away with it because of where it situates this story. The most interesting thing about the Glue Man is not his identity, or his choice of weapon (if glue can be called a weapon). It is instead the motive, his reasoning behind his actions which he explains to our heroes on the train.

Colpeper is a character with a passion for the past, a passion so forthcoming that it mutates into a desperate desire to pass it on by any means possible. He explains that the reason he only attacked women was to stop them going out with soldiers - soldiers who could just as easily attend his lectures, and who upon leaving the town could pass the knowledge on. Colpeper despises frivolity, and when he is not lecturing he is either reading or working in his garden. Eric Portman plays his scenes very well, retaining an air of graceful tranquillity even when it seems he is done for.
Regardless of whether such action was morally justified, one can't deny that elements of Colpeper's crusade rub off, both on the characters and on the audience. Sergeant Johnson, played by real-life Sergeant John Sweet, begins the film deriding English customs; there are running jokes about his stripes "being the wrong way up" and the locals mistaking his quarters for shillings. But after venting his fury to the phone operator, he slowly begins to realise his place in Canterbury's heritage. Likewise, Ms. Smith eventually finds herself standing on the same hill as the pilgrims, and in a moment of magical realism, she can almost hear them right beside her.From a narrative point of view, however, A Canterbury Tale has its problems. After the scene in the railway carriage where Colpeper confesses, the film literally runs out of steam. At that point whatever mystery there was has been solved, and yet we still have to endure half an hour of sorting out all the loose ends. The Canterbury Tales in its original form was famously unfinished - maybe that was a sly joke on Chaucer's part, who knew deep down that things should not end on a whimper. All the scenes surrounding the pilgrims in Canterbury make sense in terms of their individual arcs - Smith hears from her old friend, Johnson gets his girlfriend's letters, and Gibbs finally gets to play a proper organ. But their execution is desperately contrived, so much so that it almost sours the whole film.Then there is the more general problem of quaintness. So many films which are tarred with this label are defended as a celebration of Englishness. But while A Canterbury Tale does celebrate England and all her victories (a hangover from the propaganda days), it does come across as irritatingly picture-postcard at points. The entirely fictional village of Chillingbourne is a caricature of the English idyll, complete with hay carts and helpful landlords. A little bit of quaintness goes an awfully long way, and it is hard to go the distance without either laughing or shaking one's head in dismay.

For all their brilliance, Powell and Pressburger's record with comedy is not first-rate. Some of their films have great comic moments, like the scene in The Red Shoes where the choreographer produces an enormous champagne bottle and struggles to pour it out. But here such moments are more of a lurch from one extreme to another. The scenes with the camp village idiot, who can only say "That's right!", are funny in themselves but don't sit well with the surroundings. And that's not to mention the clunky romantic lines, like Johnson asking Ms. Smith what colour her hair is (it's black-and-white: we don't really care).A Canterbury Tale is a partial success for Powell and Pressburger. It's hampered by its narrative shortcomings and its occasionally overbearing attitude towards the inherent oddness of England. But it redeems itself in the end through a number of beautiful scenes, coupled with fine performances (watch out for Charles Hawtrey as the tetchy station master). In the end it's a minor work, an improvement on their earlier wartime output and a good indicator of the brilliance to come.

Rating: 3.5/5
Verdict: Quaint and creaky but ultimately enjoyable