Submitted by
Mark Fuller
I Know Where I'm Going
By E. Arnot [Eileen Arbuthnot] Robertson
From: Unknown publication
16 November 1945
What curious conventions the cinema has made for itself!
Here is another of those pictures - and it's the best one of the week, too - in which the heroine never speaks a courteous word to the hero until the final clinch, except when he is actively engaged in saving her life.
She is shown as selfish and ruthless, utterly inconsiderate of those who serve her, and quite intolerably boorish, I should have thought, in the company of her social equal.
But for the hero, poor boob, it is love at first snap. Odd! I Know Where I'm Going (Odeon, today) is to be remembered for its minor characters and its Scottish back- ground - and this despite fine acting from Roger Livesey and Wendy Hiller in the main parts.
Notwithstanding all the charm and intelligence lent by the players, the two lovers are such that it is impossible to care whether this objectionable young woman is, or is not, by the end of the picture, in a position to snap at this glutton for snubs for the rest of their natural lives.
The Wendy Hiller character is anxious to marry a very rich man.
She doesn't care about him personally; he is old enough to be her father, but he has a title.
We are not even given the suggestion that she has known a childhood of desperate poverty, with its humiliations and frustrations, to urge her on in single-minded pursuit of his fortune.
Indeed, her father is shown to be a prosperous-looking bank manager.
But she sets out for the island off the west coast of Scotland, where the marriage is to take place, and, when a storm delays the crossing, is willing to risk her life and the life of a nice young fisherman - and through him the happiness of the girl he is to marry - by bribing him to take out his boat when he and everyone else knows it is dangerous.
Altogether it would be hard to find a more completely odious person.
But round her is built up a picture well above the average, with many really enchanting moments in it.
I have always longed for a well-made film about rural life in this island in which everyone is mildly and delightfully balmy [sic], because that happens to be my personal experience of country communities.
Well, here it is. (Ignore some regrettable blether about an auld, auld Scots curse, forby)
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