Michael Powell

82 years after it was made, Michael Powell's A Canterbury Tale remains the perfect remedy for self-pity.

In August 1943 the director Michael Powell came to east Kent to shoot his most ambitious and personal film to date. A Canterbury Tale took its lead from Chaucer to spin the story of three modern-day pilgrims uprooted by the war. It showed us the hedgerows and the hop gardens and the ancient road atop the downs. It celebrated the values and traditions of an England under fire. That wartime summer, the film's locations came haunted by the ghosts of the pardoner, the falconer, the garrulous wife of Bath.

The film's plot runs something like this. Three weary travellers (land girl, British soldier, US sergeant) find themselves waylaid for a few days in the village of Chillingbourne, 10 minutes outside Canterbury. None of them want to be there, they would rather be at home, except that they are so beat-up, lonely and saddlesore that they hardly know where home is any more. The movie throws them together and has them solve a local mystery. Then it cuts the ties and turns them loose, batting the pilgrims on to Canterbury where they wander the bombsites and blank spaces, their lives a mess, their futures uncertain. Eventually, against all the odds, they each receive a blessing.