John Sweet’s not a name you think of when you remember the great actors, or even the lesser ones of Hollywood’s Golden Age. He was a Minneapolis schoolteacher turned sergeant in the Army, training in Great Britain to liberate Europe from fascism when he was “discovered” by the producing/directing duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,

Something about Sweet’s drawl and lanky, folksy demeanor suggested an idealized GI to the British filmmakers — a blend of “foreignness,” common sense and common decency — so they drafted him into duty on their World War II allegory, “A Canterbury Tale.”

Sweet gives a grand, unaffected “real person” performance in this film, one of several “morale boosting” keep-calm-and-carry-on movies Powell and Pressburger made during the war, a lighthearted, sentimental follow-up to their anti-isolationist classic, “The 49th Parallel.”

It’s a vaguely Chaucer-esque yarn about “pilgrims” — an American GI, a British Tommy (Dennis Price), and a London shop girl (Sheila Sim) enlisted to do farm work in the country — who meet on the train to Canterbury, get off one stop short and tumble into a local crime and mystery.

Veteran heavy Eric Portman is Colpeper, the mysterious local landed gentry now magistrate of tiny fictioncal Chillingbourne, not far down “The Pilgrim’s Way” from the cathedral city immortalized by Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century story collection, “The Canterbury Tales.”

When the lost American Sgt. Johnson, ag worker Alison and received pronunciation posh Sgt. Gibbs stop there, Alison is doused by the locally-infamous scoundrel “The Glue Man.” As the magistrate seems to have all the power in town and a few peculiar habits with regards to the visiting soldiers, and no more eagerness to solve the crime than the constable or any other locals, Alison enlists the other “pilgrims” to crack the case, with all eyes pointing to Mr. Colpeper being the culprit.

I mean, he’s played by Eric Portman. Of course he’s the prime suspect.

The sleuthing entails Alison’s taking a farm job and quizzing the locals, Sgt. Gibbs working out the MO of the criminal and Sgt Johnson’s winning ways with the nosy, gossipy local boys, all of whom are busy playing war and providing clues.

The historic road has had a bit of archeological excavation recently, and coupled with this idealized view of the WWII English (Kentish) countryside, we hear a little about English patrimony, the long history of freedom, and cracks about the “tea drinking, left-side driving” and of all things The Domesday Book from cornball Bob, the Sgt. from Oregon.

“Tea? I don’t like that stuff.”

“Sure, it’s a habit, like marijiuana!”

“I’ll take marijuana!”

The “snooping about” and clue-collecting “story” isn’t what’s interesting now, almost 80 years later. It’s this sense of “This is the Britain, the traditions, people and freedoms that we’re fighting for” messaging.

The jokes that still work (one of them Cheech & Chong approved) include cracks about “isolationist” Americans, the Anglo-American language barrier and the wonderful black and white depiction of Kent — thatched barns, rolling fields (traversed by speeding Bren-gun armored personnel carriers) and ancient horse-and-wagon folkways still in use there.

And then there’s the cathedral city of Canterbury itself, and a glimpse of what inspired this “tale” — a war brought home to all of Britain, at one point or another.

Powell was a star director by war’s end, and would go on to make some of the most gorgeous movies ever filmed in color — “The Red Shoes” and “Black Narcissis” among them.

Price enjoyed a long career after this film, Sims only worked for another decade. And Sweet, the soldier drafted into film acting for just a short period of 1944, playing a poster boy American GI of the day, made it through the war and back to teaching school — with a little stage acting on the side — in America.

He’d played the earnest, honest and upright uniformed American come to save democracy and not hit on every English rose he spied in the lcoal pubs and dance halls, a bit of home-front propaganda for pre-D-Day Brits perhaps wearying of the noisy, boisterous and catnip-to-the-ladies Yanks who had “invaded” their “scepter’d isle.”

Who could live up to that “ideal Yank” image? Maybe John Sweet could. He took the $2000 he was paid for his one and only major film role and donated it to the NAACP. He retired to the English-style retirement village “Fearrington” in North Carolina, and died at age 95 in 2011, a model example of “The Greatest Generation.”

“A Canterbury Tale” may not be top rank of films from Powell’s canon. It’s dated in some unflattering ways (a stammerer is ridiculed as “the village idiot”). But it makes an adorably quaint snapshot — complete with marijuana joke — of the war in Britain and an English countryside perhaps properly spoiled by progress and by too many years of TV’s “Escape to the Country.”

Rating: “approved”

Cast: Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, John Sweet and Dennis Price.

Credits: Scripted, directed and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. An Eagle-Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, Tubi, etc.

Running time: 2:04