I'm beginning to think the whole village is cracked.
Recently released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, 1944's A Canterbury Tale is the sort of film that the writing, producing and directing duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger seemed to be able to make in their sleep. It's a delightful film that links the pilgrims of 600 years ago to those of the present day, and which prefigures 2001's famous bone to spacecraft transition by two decades. (In this case, it's falcon to fighter plane -- not as much of a leap, but still carried out with skill.)
Eric Portman stars as the magistrate of Chillingbourne, the village that is the last stop on the way to Canterbury, with Sheila Sim as a "Land Girl" sent there to work who is a victim of the dreaded "Glue Man," Dennis Price as a British sergeant waiting to be shipped out, and Sgt. John Sweet (on loan from the U.S. Army) as an American sergeant on furlough who gets waylaid in Chillingbourne while he helps Sim and Price solve the mystery of the Glue Man (whose m.o. involves dumping glue in girls' hair to deter them from being out at night). Sweet also enlists a group of boys, whose activities prefigure John Boorman's wartime memoir Hope and Glory by four decades.
Once the Glue Man is identified and confronted, all concerned complete their pilgrimage to Canterbury, where -- just like their forebears -- they receive their blessings. The real blessing of the film, though, is its depiction of the way ordinary Britons lived during wartime, and the majestic scenes at Canterbury Cathedral. Too bad American viewers only saw a horribly truncated cut when it was first released here in 1949. (A half hour was cut from the film, and a corny framing device imposed on it. So Godzilla wasn't the only film that sort of thing happened to...)