Plot
The story concerns three young people: British Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), US Army Sergeant Bob Johnson (played by real-life Sergeant John Sweet), and a 'Land Girl', Miss Alison Smith (Sheila Sim). The group arrive at the railway station in the fictitious small Kent town of Chillingbourne (filmed in Chilham, Fordwich, Wickhambreaux and other villages in the area), near Canterbury, late on Friday night, 27 August 1943. Peter has been stationed at a nearby Army camp, Alison is due to start working on a farm in the area, and Bob left the train by mistake, hearing the announcement "next stop Canterbury" and thinking he was in Canterbury.
As they leave the station together Alison is attacked by a mysterious assailant in uniform who pours glue on her hair, before escaping. It transpires that this has happened quite a few times before. Alison asks Bob if he could spend the weekend in Chillingbourne to help her solve the mystery. The next day, while riding a farm cart in the countryside, Alison meets Peter, who surrounds her cart with his platoon of three Bren Gun Carriers. Alison agrees to meet Peter again. The three decide to investigate the attack, enlisting the help of the locals, including several young boys who play large-scale war games.
The three use their detective skills to identify the culprit as a local magistrate, Mr Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), a gentleman farmer and pillar of the community, who also gives local history lectures to soldiers stationed in the district. Alison interviews all the glue man's victims to identify the dates and times of their attacks. Gibbs visits Colpeper at his home and borrows the fire watch roster listing the nights Colpeper was on duty in the town hall, whilst Johnson's boy commandos, under the cover of a paper drive for salvage lets Johnson discover receipts for gum used to make glue sold to Colpeper. The dates of the attacks correspond with Colpeper's night watches where he wore a Home Guard uniform kept in the town hall to carry out his attacks.
On a train journey to Canterbury on the Monday morning, Colpeper joins them in their compartment. They confront him with their suspicions, which he doesn't deny, and they discover that his motive is to prevent the soldiers from being distracted away from his lectures by female company and to help keep the local women faithful to their absent British boyfriends. In Colpeper's words, Chaucer's pilgrims travelled to Canterbury to "receive a blessing, or to do penance". On arriving in the city of Canterbury, devastated by wartime bombing, all three young people receive blessings of their own. Alison discovers that her boyfriend, believed killed in the war, has survived after all; his father, who had blocked their marriage because he thought his son could do better than a shopgirl, finally relents. Bob receives long-delayed letters from his sweetheart, who is now a WAC in Australia. Peter, a cinema organist before the war, gets to play the music of J.S. Bach on the large organ at Canterbury Cathedral, before leaving with his unit. He decides not to report Mr Colpeper to the Canterbury police, as he had planned to do – in its way a blessing for Colpeper, when he had expected instead to do penance.
Read more about this topic: A Canterbury Tale
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