After the first half hour or so I was ready to turn the movie off and get back to my book. The acting and story both seemed patched together out of nothing much.
Three people are stranded temporarily in a small English village during wartime, all planning for one or another reason to visit the cathedral in Canterbury, to which the pilgrims of 600 years earlier had traveled for blessing or to do penance. Eric Portman is the equivalent of the mayor. He's a fourth figure who seems to preside over everything. He's a mystical presence who is friendly enough, eager to impart his knowledge of Canterbury and its pilgrims to anyone willing to listen to him, but he keeps coming up with these portentous yet elliptical sayings that seem pregnant with some sort of deeper significance. "A caravan is temporary. All things with wheels are meant to move." It's not as silly as it sounds when taken out of context like this, and Portman does a good job in its delivery.
The three travelers who provide the focus for the film are John Sweet, a talkative sergeant in the US Army, who looks goofy, sounds like Red Skelton, and moons over the girl back home who hasn't written him in seven weeks. His adventitious companions are Shiela Sim, a chirpy and no-nonsense young lady who believes her fiancé to have been shot down and killed over Europe; and Dennis Price, younger and more ridden with momentum that you've ever seen him before, a disillusioned sergeant from the big city who gave up a career as an organist. They are drawn together by their status as guests in the little village and by their joint desire to find out who dumped glue into Shiela Sim's hair during the blackout. (They never do find out.) Well -- they bump into each other from time to time, and into other village residents, until they decide to coordinate their efforts to find the miscreant. After the first half hour I took up my book several times but couldn't concentrate on it because I was continually drawn back into the movie.
Things happen, little events, that you don't expect to see or hear. I'll give an example of what I mean. Here's Sergeant Sweet, from Oregon, USA -- timber country. He's a figure of some ridicule. He speaks like a hick and smokes a corn cob pipe and says things like, "Say, Pop, is there a hotel in this town?" People make gentle fun of the fact that his sergeant's chevrons are upside down. But then the script gives him a quiet scene in a large carpenter's shop in which he displays dignity, generosity, and a shared knowledge of lumber with the proprietor. As a comic figure, he's a failure. As a more fleshed out character, he succeeds.
The same thing happens to a greater or lesser extent with the other characters. All three of them achieve some sort of satisfaction by the end: Sweet finally gets a fist full of letters from his girl friend back home; she'd joined the WAACs and been transferred to Australia. Sims learns her fiancé is alive and in Gibraltar. Price meets the organist at Canterbury Cathedral, rediscovers his calling, and runs through Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a thrilling piece, while the camera slides into a long shot of the cathedral's immense nave and its magnificent vaulting. It's a hair-raising image that reminded me of Kenneth Clark's series, "Civilization."
There's more to it than meets the eye during that first half hour. There's even some impish humor. During an argument with Eric Portman on the train to Canterbury, Price makes some scoffing remark about, "When that happens, I'll be wearing a halo round my head," and at that moment the trains lurches into the sunshine, the compartment floods with light, and Price's head is backlighted with the glow.
If we want to be banal, it's a message movie. It's 1944. The Yanks have invaded England preparatory to invading France on D Day. We must all pull together and hope for the best. And let's not forget that, though England may change, the nation is a monument to itself and its own past, just as the cathedral is. God's in His heaven; all's right with the world -- or will be, just as soon as we can figure out how to operate these danged English phones and reckon the translations from quarters and dollars to shillings and quid.
It's a tranquil and good-natured fairy tale, though still a fairy tale. During Chaucer's time the cathedral was used as a dormitory for travelers, pilgrims, and the poor. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the nominal head of the Anglican Church but four Archbishops were murdered. Yet the fact that it's uplifting in its own way adds to its charm, rather than detracts from it. I don't believe that "There's no place like home," either, but I almost choke up when Dorothy clicks the heels of her ruby slippers together at the end of "The Wizard of Oz." What WOULD we do without our myths?
Three people are stranded temporarily in a small English village during wartime, all planning for one or another reason to visit the cathedral in Canterbury, to which the pilgrims of 600 years earlier had traveled for blessing or to do penance. Eric Portman is the equivalent of the mayor. He's a fourth figure who seems to preside over everything. He's a mystical presence who is friendly enough, eager to impart his knowledge of Canterbury and its pilgrims to anyone willing to listen to him, but he keeps coming up with these portentous yet elliptical sayings that seem pregnant with some sort of deeper significance. "A caravan is temporary. All things with wheels are meant to move." It's not as silly as it sounds when taken out of context like this, and Portman does a good job in its delivery.
The three travelers who provide the focus for the film are John Sweet, a talkative sergeant in the US Army, who looks goofy, sounds like Red Skelton, and moons over the girl back home who hasn't written him in seven weeks. His adventitious companions are Shiela Sim, a chirpy and no-nonsense young lady who believes her fiancé to have been shot down and killed over Europe; and Dennis Price, younger and more ridden with momentum that you've ever seen him before, a disillusioned sergeant from the big city who gave up a career as an organist. They are drawn together by their status as guests in the little village and by their joint desire to find out who dumped glue into Shiela Sim's hair during the blackout. (They never do find out.) Well -- they bump into each other from time to time, and into other village residents, until they decide to coordinate their efforts to find the miscreant. After the first half hour I took up my book several times but couldn't concentrate on it because I was continually drawn back into the movie.
Things happen, little events, that you don't expect to see or hear. I'll give an example of what I mean. Here's Sergeant Sweet, from Oregon, USA -- timber country. He's a figure of some ridicule. He speaks like a hick and smokes a corn cob pipe and says things like, "Say, Pop, is there a hotel in this town?" People make gentle fun of the fact that his sergeant's chevrons are upside down. But then the script gives him a quiet scene in a large carpenter's shop in which he displays dignity, generosity, and a shared knowledge of lumber with the proprietor. As a comic figure, he's a failure. As a more fleshed out character, he succeeds.
The same thing happens to a greater or lesser extent with the other characters. All three of them achieve some sort of satisfaction by the end: Sweet finally gets a fist full of letters from his girl friend back home; she'd joined the WAACs and been transferred to Australia. Sims learns her fiancé is alive and in Gibraltar. Price meets the organist at Canterbury Cathedral, rediscovers his calling, and runs through Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a thrilling piece, while the camera slides into a long shot of the cathedral's immense nave and its magnificent vaulting. It's a hair-raising image that reminded me of Kenneth Clark's series, "Civilization."
There's more to it than meets the eye during that first half hour. There's even some impish humor. During an argument with Eric Portman on the train to Canterbury, Price makes some scoffing remark about, "When that happens, I'll be wearing a halo round my head," and at that moment the trains lurches into the sunshine, the compartment floods with light, and Price's head is backlighted with the glow.
If we want to be banal, it's a message movie. It's 1944. The Yanks have invaded England preparatory to invading France on D Day. We must all pull together and hope for the best. And let's not forget that, though England may change, the nation is a monument to itself and its own past, just as the cathedral is. God's in His heaven; all's right with the world -- or will be, just as soon as we can figure out how to operate these danged English phones and reckon the translations from quarters and dollars to shillings and quid.
It's a tranquil and good-natured fairy tale, though still a fairy tale. During Chaucer's time the cathedral was used as a dormitory for travelers, pilgrims, and the poor. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the nominal head of the Anglican Church but four Archbishops were murdered. Yet the fact that it's uplifting in its own way adds to its charm, rather than detracts from it. I don't believe that "There's no place like home," either, but I almost choke up when Dorothy clicks the heels of her ruby slippers together at the end of "The Wizard of Oz." What WOULD we do without our myths?