Display MoreWe've thrown around the expression "that was a weird one" before but… that was a weird one. The Canterbury Tales (1972) is certainly a movie that will stick in your head, with its endless graphic sex scenes and, ah, giant prop devil defecating corrupt friars at the conclusion. But as crazy as it all is, a lot of it is actually a very reasonable adaptation of some of the tales from The Canterbury Tales (including the devil thing). It's a movie that is, at the very least, worth seeing!
Before I forget (because I already did last week), you can read the original text of The Canterbury Tales at Project Gutenberg. Now: Baron Jukaga mentions Chaucer, the author of the Canterbury Tales, and here's director Pasolini playing him in the movie. The adaptation drops the idea that the pilgrims are telling each other these stories and instead has Chaucer writing them. The conclusion is also significantly different: the movie's Chaucer has written the tales for "no other reason than telling them" while the book apologizes to God for all of the tawdriness in the service of glorifying God.
It might also be useful to see where Canterbury actually is. Jukaga notes that Tolwyn was born near Canterbury, which is a tantalizing piece of background that's never detailed. The same novel shows us Tolwyn's family estate, Windward, in the Shetland Islands in the North Sea. By human reasoning that's not really close to Canterbury at all, so I won't venture a guess as to where Tolwyn was actually born.
I also got to thinking that the 'joke' in Fleet Action, that the Canterbury Tales are the same as a Kilrathi story about "the blood feast of Sivar" might be a nod to Dan Simmons' wonderful 1989 Hyperion, which reimagines the pilgrims as traveling to a sort of space monster that's going to impale them on its' tree of pain. But heck, it also expresses exactly the division between the tales and the film, with many of the same structures used to tell very different stories.
This was Sully's reaction to the film's conclusion.
