A Canterbury Tale (1944)

A Canterbury Tale is a 1944 British film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger starring Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price and Sgt. John Sweet; Esmond Knight provided narration and played two small roles. For the post-war American release, Raymond Massey narrated and Kim Hunter was added to the film. The film was made in black and white, and was the first of two collaborations between Powell and Pressburger and cinematographer Erwin Hillier.

Much of the film's visual style is a mixture of British realism and Hillier's German Expressionist style that is harnessed through a neo-romantic sense of the English landscape. The concept that 'the past always haunts the present' in the English landscape was already part of English literary culture, e.g. in works by Rudyard Kipling such as Puck of Pook's Hill, and would become a notable trope for British novelists and film-makers from the 1960s. A Canterbury Tale takes its title from the 14th-century The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer and loosely uses Chaucer's theme of "eccentric characters on a religious pilgrimage" to highlight the wartime experiences of the citizens of Kent and encourage wartime Anglo-American friendship and understanding. Anglo-American relations were also explored in Powell and Pressburger's previous film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and in more detail in their subsequent film A Matter of Life and Death.