Submitted by
Mark Fuller
I Know Where I'm Going
By Elspeth Grant
From: Daily Sketch
16 November 1945
I was about to say that we have this week been suffering from
a rush of British films to the screen - but suffering is not the
word. It has been a pleasure to see that we can produce a
film about our own islands, positively lyrical in its loveliness,
and a modestly priced movie of genuine entertainment value,
and a handsome slab of boloney that may well make Hollywood
goggle, so much does it resemble, in its glossy incredibility, the
genuwine Hollywood article. [The latter portion presumably
refers to The Wicked Lady, also out this week]
I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING (Odeon), written, produced and
directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a picture
- and a very beautiful one - of life in the Hebrides. It was shot
mainly on the Isle of Mull, and gives a wonderfully vivid
impression of wild, craggy scenery, fierce, tearing winds, heavy
falling veils of mist and perilous seas and thundering whirlpools -
of simple people, living frugally, of a nobility, austere, proud and
tradition bound.
The story is of an English girl (Wendy Hiller) who intends to
marry for his money the wealthy English tenant of the tiny island
of Kiloran (lovely name!). Storm-bound on Mull, she meets the
poor man who owns the island, the true laird of Kiloran (Roger
Livesey), and in the end decides to marry him - at which I am
not surprised.
I will not deny that I resented the intrusion of a stock film
character - the idiotically obstinate miss for whom good men
must risk their lives - into a film so otherwise fresh and fine. But
I would forgive more than that for the sea sequences, the"ceilidh",
and the excellence of the players, among whom Nancy Price,
Pamela Brown, Finlay Currie, Margot Fitzsimons, Jean Cadell,
and Captain C.W.R. Knight and "Mr. Ramshaw", his magnificent
golden eagle, cannot pass unmentioned.
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