A Canterbury Tale (1944) on Netflix
Sergeant Peter Gibbs, American Sergeant Bob Johnson and Land Girl Alison Smith step off at Chillingbourne. When someone pours glue into Alison's hair, she asks Bob to help find the assailant.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Peter Gibbs, a cinema organist now serving as a British Army sergeant, has been posted to the camp outside Chillingbourne, a small town near Canterbury. Alison Smith, a London shop assistant who has joined the Women's Land Army, is bound for a farm in the area. Bob Johnson, an American sergeant, leaves the train there by mistake, having heard Canterbury announced and believed he had arrived. As the three leave the station together, a man in uniform pours glue into Alison's hair and gets away. Other women have been attacked in the same way, and the locals call the attacker the glue man. Alison asks Bob to spend the weekend helping her find him, and Peter, whose unit is training nearby, joins the search.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Canterbury Tale (1944)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Canterbury Cathedral could not be used for filming because its stained glass had been taken down, its windows boarded up and its organ removed to storage to protect them from air raids. Art director Alfred Junge recreated large portions of the cathedral inside the studio using clever perspective.
- The film was the first Powell and Pressburger production not to be a major box office draw; with the war over, Powell was forced by the studio to re-edit it for the US release, cutting over 20 minutes, adding Raymond Massey's narration and filming bookends that introduced Kim Hunter as Sergeant Johnson's girlfriend.
- The film was shot across Kent not long after the Baedeker raids of May-June 1942, which destroyed large areas of Canterbury's city center. Location work used the city's bomb sites, among them the High Street, Rose Lane and the Buttermarket.
- The film's theme was used by Spike Milligan for his 1954 Goon Show episode "The Phantom Head Shaver of Brighton".
