Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going!, a
wonderful romantic drama, set in the Hebrides, should be more widely
recognised as one of the classic films of our time. Lacking sentimentality,
it is an intelligent film, and not in the least bit whimsical. it
tells
the story of Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), the sophisticated daughter of
a
bank manager, who travels to Scotland to marry 'one of the richest men in
the country', the chairman of Consolidated Chemical Industries. While
stranded on the mainland in a storm, she falls in love with Torquil McNeil
(Roger Livesey), a naval officer on leave, whom she later discovers to be
the Laird of Killoran. During the storm she stays with Torquil's friends,
Colonel Barnstaple (Captain C.W.R. Knight) and Catriona (Pamela Brown).
This film, about a woman who thinks she knows where she is going
but
doesn't, could be telling us something about lesbians. Sometimes they are
women who think they know where they are going (a husband, home, 2 point
4
children and heterosexual domesticity), but discover that life has something
else to offer. In this film Joan Webster is not allowed to go where she
wants to. She doesn't even meet the man she has been planning to marry.
Instead she encounters Torquil and Catriona.
Long-haired, wild Catriona is a lover of big dogs, and who assertively calls
herself an 'old bag'. Torquil describes her as a 'queer girl'. After Joan
has almost killed herself trying to get to the island in the middle of the
storm, Catriona orders her to her bedroom: "There's a fire in my
room
and that's where you'll sleep." The following 'bedroom scene' between the
two
women is ambiguous. Does Catriona actually leave the bedroom? We don't
see her leave and, when morning comes, her dogs are still
sitting
at the foot of the bed. In the next scene we see Joan, who, has always looked
so perfect, looking relaxed and carefree, sitting on a table and swing her
legs. Looking rather butch, she says wistfully "I can't do anything with
my
hair." Has Catriona liberated her? Has she opened new doors for Joan? Says
Joan to Catriona at the end of the film, before she is united with Torquil:
"Goodbye Catriona. Thank you for everything". We can only speculate about
what she means.
The subtext to this extraordinary film is a fear of sexuality. For example,
on the train to Scotland, we see Joan's wedding dress wrapped in cellophane,
and later superstition prevents Torquil from entering the Castle of Moy.
Finally, there is Catriona, who reveals that, during the war, she was
surrounded by RAF pilots stationed at Kiloran, but she had her big dogs
to
protect her.
Off-screen Pamela brown was as sexually ambivalent as Catriona. In
Million-Dollar Movie, the second volume of his autobiography, Michael Powell
recalled a conversation he had with his wife, Frankie, in 1950 when he was
considering brown for the role the boy-girl, girl-boy Nicklaus in Tales
of
Hoffmann. Frankie had said to Powell: "I always thought there was a touch
of
the lesbian in Pamela." Says Powell:
"In this she was right. All actors are continually experimenting and
inventing their hormones, their male and female genes, and a few have the
luck to be evenly balanced between their sexual drives. Pamela was one of
these. She was a witch. Women adored her, men feared her, and for the same
reason - she fascinated them ... Pamela was "the ugliest woman in the world"
(Emeric Pressburger) or "the most beautiful" (John Gielgud and Laurence
Olivier) ... the great Continental actresses were her models: Rachel,
Bernhardt, Duse. She was blessed with a big voice, and a magnificent chest
and
lungs upon which she could strike organ notes. her eyes were like two flames,
lighting up eery corner of the theatre, and above all she had intelligence,
which burned upon her brow and illuminated every move she made and every
word she said? (MDM pp95, 533-4)
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