Jacques Demy’s 1972 film The Pied Piper is a countercultural take on the legend which in some ways comes a little after its time. Donovan’s fey troubadour is a figure from 1967 rather than the early 70s, when the zeitgeist already blew a little more harshly, the idyllic summer a memory eclipsed by subsequent unrest, fragmentation and narcotic drift. The dream of a medieval age of pageantry is thus as much a dream of the 60s ideals which were seeming ever more remote.

The generational and ideological divide which marked the decade is here represented by the forces of the church, the armed state and the newly ascendant business class, who are ranged against the artists and philosophers (the peasantry don’t get much of a look in, here). These powerful Hamelin cliques are conveniently colour-coded (although not to the extent of having their faces painted blue or red, as Demy pigmented his servants and soldiery in his 1970 fairy tale Peau d’Ane, or Donkey Skin).

The baron and his enforcers wear a mouldy green broken up by sloping military stripes. The cardinals and bishops are wrapped in scarlet, their perspiring faces peering beadily out from capacious hoods. The merchants wear black jerkins (or a more plush red for the higher amongst them) which give them a puffed-out, preening look.

The travelling theatre troupe which comes to town have their own loose uniform of striped tunics, but the colours are varied and natural – sky blue, blossomy peach, earthy brown and mossy green. They are colours which reflect the landscape which they pass through, and in which they make their camp each night, and suggest that they are more at home here than in the cities and towns where they go to perform.