Jonathan S, I really appreciated reading your reaction to the film, and I sympathise with a lot of what you say. Despite my love for the films I mentioned above, I can’t help being uncomfortable with their propagandist elements, and the ways in which they try to make the horrors of war palatable to the audience. Michael Redgrave’s poems in
The Way to the Stars are very moving from one point of view, but insidiously manipulative from another, and as you say this is something a viewer has to ‘wrestle with’.
I would push back on a couple of points, however:
Jonathan S wrote:I suppose my general resistance to anything spiritual and especially religious impedes my enjoyment of this film [...] I don’t think that this amounts to much more than a warming over of the old Christian chestnut of “love the sinner, hate the sin.” And I do think this is an essentially Christian film, as in its repeated implication that a church organ is in every sense loftier than a cinema one.
I’m not at all religious and have no sense of spirituality, though I quite like engaging with religious texts and films – however, this didn’t really strike me as a Christian film, and I don’t see the message as ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’, even if it was intended that way.
TWBB’s reading of the film resonates with me in some ways, but I think I’m coming at this from a different angle. For me, the film is not particularly interested in love or even empathy. I like the fact that the characters don’t fall in love with each other (except maybe Colpeper with Alison, see below) or even become close friends. There’s a sense that this whole experience is a kind of interlude in their lives, a brief encounter with something far stranger and more mysterious than romantic or Christian love, or empathy, or understanding.
When you say that you find the ‘onward Christian soldiers’ ending chilling, I agree, and indeed I think there is something gently disturbing about the whole film. The cathedral is kind of elemental and uncanny, as is the countryside around Chillingbourne where you can hear echoes from the past around every corner. It’s not quite at the level of uncanny horror you find in, say, a David Lynch film, but there is something of that chilling encounter with the abyss in Powell & Pressburger’s films.
The most obvious example is
Black Narcissus, but even in a film as good-natured as
Colonel Blimp there is a sense of strange forces at work, not necessarily good or evil but just ‘there’, an aspect of how we experience the universe. There are good reasons to be judgemental about Clive’s naive sense of honour, about Theo’s cynicism, and about the new generation’s cold-blooded pragmatism, and we see the characters judging each other for these attitudes – and we also understand that each attitude has consequences, some good and some devastatingly bad. But the film itself isn’t interested in judging these attitudes, it just portrays them for what they are, invites us to acknowledge and accept them, and leaves us with a sense that they co-exist more or less awkwardly in a world that perhaps cannot be understood or judged in any definitive way.
The same applies to Sister Clodagh’s and Sister Ruth’s behaviour in
Black Narcissus: depending on your perspective, you can judge either or both of these characters in different ways (as they judge each other), but when I watch that film I just feel like I’m ‘there’ with them, facing the realisation that these are things that happen in this world, like the torrential rain that falls at the end. Morality, faith, any kind of order or intentions that people might have – all that stuff seems irrelevant after staring over that beautiful, terrifying cliff edge. When I see Sister Ruth come through the doorway at the end, I don’t feel like I’m looking at someone I should be judging, or loving, or empathising with, or even at someone suffering from mental illness who needs treatment. I don’t know how to describe what the film shows me in that moment, except that it feels very ‘real’ and fills me with an entirely non-moral, non-spiritual sense of terror and awe.
A Canterbury Tale is clearly much less dramatic and extreme, but I think that deep down it has a similar attitude to the people and the phenomena it portrays. As I said in my previous post, on this second viewing it seemed very clear that there were strong grounds for judging and condemning Colpeper’s criminal behaviour, misogyny, paternalism, etc. – but the film also acknowledges that there are other perspectives that are perhaps not concerned with the ‘rightness’ of his behaviour, and that see him in a different context. This kind of non-moral attitude is itself open to criticism, as a kind of moral cop-out, a failure to condemn things that should be condemned. Perhaps as well as being a non-spiritual and non-religious person, I also tend to have a rather non-moral point of view about life, and that’s why I read it in this way.
But for instance, I don’t quite agree that the film implies ‘a church organ is in every sense loftier than a cinema one’, any more than it implies Canterbury Cathedral is superior to the small church built by Sergeant Johnson’s ancestor. We might expect the church organist to look down his nose at the cinema organist, but instead he recalls being a circus organist himself, and speculates about the relative value of their salaries. When he offers Gibbs the chance to play the church organ, he is allowing him to fulfil a long-held ambition, and there is a sense that this is a ‘blessing’ and a great experience for Gibbs; but it also suggests a continuity between the organ-playing that goes on in circuses, cinemas, and cathedrals, under-cutting Colpeper’s remark about the ‘man who learns to play Bach and ends up playing popular music’ vs. the ‘man who learns to walk step by step and climbs Mount Everest’. Gibbs is both of these men – he’s a cinema organist who ends up on the mountain peak – and the film invites us to deconstruct our judgements about the relative worth of these identities or activities. That goes hand in hand with its failure to judge Colpeper himself.
Jonathan S wrote:However, my real problem with it isn’t so much the treatment of Colpepper’s crime but that I don’t find him at all credible as a character. Portman is after all top-billed – literally the name above the title – and, though he possesses the commanding authority typical of English actors in this period, I don’t find him a very sensitive or nuanced actor. He’s no Laughton.
Well I love Charles Laughton so I won’t argue with that, but I do also have a soft spot for Eric Portman. This probably stems from frequent re-viewings of
The Prisoner and
The Bedford Incident when I was a teenager. Neither of those roles are particularly ‘English’, to me; in the latter he’s German, and in the former he’s working for an organisation with no specified nationality. He’s good at playing a morally ambivalent or inaccessible authority figure (see also
49th Parallel and
Corridor of Mirrors) thanks in part to his clipped, repressed, remote speech patterns. Without subtitles and/or a clean soundtrack, it’s often hard to decipher what he’s saying, because he has a way of swallowing his words – a kind of ‘burbling’ that is often associated with the repression of the British upper-class, but that has a subtly different resonance with Portman. It works in
The Prisoner as a complement to Patrick McGoohan’s (differently) inscrutable performance, and in
The Bedford Incident as a complement to Richard Widmark’s and Sidney Poitier’s more demonstrative acting.
Portman’s effectiveness can be summed up by two moments in the latter film, which I’ll describe without spoiling the plot. First, when he confronts Widmark near the end and says, ‘No, captain – to be frank, I consider you frightening’; and then soon afterwards, in his final appearance, when he just looks at Widmark and walks away. In the first moment, we’re amazed that this ice-cold former U-boat commander, who seems so utterly checked out from reality, could be frightened by anything. In the second moment, he seems more checked-out than ever, while somehow conveying (with that look) a sense of deep and intense emotion. Without this performance, the film would not be nearly as impactful or disturbing.
I know what you mean when you say Portman is not a sensitive or nuanced actor, and I can see how he would come across as wooden to some viewers. But to me, he’s one of those actors who can appear to be doing almost literally nothing, and yet give me that sense of awe and terror I was talking about before. Something is happening beneath that impenetrable surface and those impenetrable line-readings, and I find it compulsively watchable. (Still would have been great to see Laughton in this role, though.)
barbarella satyricon wrote:Simply put, my sense by the film's end was that Colpeper had been effectively shut out of the threefold "miracle(s)" of the other central characters, and also, by extension, from whatever other granting or manifestation of "wishes" that may have visited the community of pilgrims congregated. It is a curiously charged image of vexation and of more than a little bitter, badly chastened self-reflection that I recall as the near-final (penultimate?) shot of the film, of Alison being guided by her boyfriend's father into the inner area of the cathedral (symbolic sanctum, if you will), and Colpeper, not even noticed by the two, left on the outside, seemingly frozen in the moment, looking, to my mind, like a figure in frieze, set in a rigid depiction, almost as in a scene of judgment.
I read this the same way as you, although I don’t see vexation or bitterness in his reaction to Alison walking past. In fact, I think this moment is a weird kind of vindication for Colpeper. He said that pilgrims go to Canterbury for blessings or for penance: sure enough, the other three characters get their blessings, and he humbly closes his eyes and accepts his penance. It’s almost as if he has engineered this situation towards this conclusion in order to prove a point.
