Submitted by
Mark Fuller
I Know Where I'm Going
By C.A. Lejeune
From: The Observer
18 November 1945
Michael Powell's new film "I Know Where I'm Going", is a disappointment, because it has all the makings of a good picture, but has mixed them with some of the tricks of a very bad one. It tells the story of a determined young woman (Wendy Hiller) who goes up to the Western Isles to marry a rich business man. While waiting on the mainland for the boat that will take her to her fiance's rented island, she meets and falls in love with the island's real owner (Roger Livesey). Days of storm, after fog, give the pair a chance to do some local sight-seeing, which is forced on the audience willy-nilly. Personally I can stand, and even welcome, a certain amount of local atmosphere, but it does shake me up when I find Captain Knight, F.Z.S. exercising his extremely urbane golden eagle, Mr. Ramshaw, in these misty fastnesses, and Graham Moffat, the Fat Boy from the Will Hay comedies, shaking an ample leg at a Highland ceilidh.
The real point of the picture, I take it, is bedded in a snatch of conversation in which the hero tells the heroine that having no money is a very different thing from poverty. This is a fine idea, and the authors would have done well to develop it; at the risk of excluding the Fat Boy, the golden eagle, the family curse, the ceilidh, and all that fancy montage work at the beginning. While they were about it, they might also have printed the main title in decent capitals. To call a film, "i know where i'm going" is a pretty clear sign that I don't quite.
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