A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Broadly uses the themes in Geoffrey Chaucer's similarly titled story and updates them to present day. Three people meet by chance late in the evening at Chillingbourne Rail Station as they are headed off in different directions. The first is London shop girl Alison Smith, who, under the WLA, has been sent there to work on the farm of the town's magistrate, Thomas Colpeper. He, in seeing her, believes she wouldn't be well suited to the work largely in feeling she an easy target for the soldiers stationed at the nearby army camp, leaving her to look for other work while she's there and adding to the already bad taste she has in her mouth about him just in the uneasy feeling she has around him. She has an attachment to the region in having been there on a memorable caravan trip with a now deceased ex-fiance (a casualty of the war although not the reason they split) in 1940, that caravan, which she now owns, being stored in a garage in Canterbury. The second is British Army Sergeant Peter Gibbs who is on his way to a new assignment at that army camp and who, in his civilian life, is an organist at a London cinema. The third is US Army Sergeant Bob Johnson, who, on leave, got off at the wrong station in he actually heading to Canterbury, the next stop ten minutes away. He hasn't heard from his girlfriend back home in Oregon in weeks, he believing the silence, much to his dismay, meaning that she has moved on from him. The three bond in dealing with an issue that plagued Alison while they were walking into town in the dark and that they will learn has been a common occurrence of late: that an unknown male dressed in an army uniform doused her hair with glue, she otherwise unharmed as were all the other young women who befell the fate of who the townsfolk call the Glue Man. While they work individually and together to find the culprit, they all learn about life in the region, including the historic pilgrim road to Canterbury, much of such history provided through formal lectures to anyone attached to the military by Colpeper, which in this case can include Alison. By chance, Alison, Gibbs, Johnson, and Colpeper head to Canterbury on the same train, the trip which ends up being a pilgrimage for the first three for different reasons.