Director:
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
CLV: $69.95
2 discs, catalog # CC1389L
I Know Where I'm Going! is
a love story which is also a fable. Joan Webster thinks she knows exactly
where she's going:
to marry the richest industrialist in Britain. But when the
elements stop her from reaching a remote Scottish island where the wedding
is due to take place, she gradually realizes that fate
-- and a young navy officer on leave
-- are trying to tell her something.
Powell and Pressburger had sprung to fame among Britain's World War II
filmmakers with such original contributions to the war effort as
49th Parallel, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing,
and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
With the war's end in sight, they had turned to more personal and
speculative themes in A Canterbury Tale.
This, they felt, was the first salvo in a "crusade against materialism"
-- an attempt to remind their war-weary audience what it had been fighting
for.
Next they were due to tackle a big film about the rocky state of
Anglo-American relations (which would eventually become
A Matter of Life and Death) but in late 1944 there was
no Technicolor stock available.
What could be made quickly and in black and white?, Powell asked Pressburger.
The answer was something about a girl who can't reach an island,
and by the time she can, she no longer wants to go.
Why can't she go? demanded Powell.
"Let's make the film and find out," was Pressburger's response.
Pressburger recalled that the script of
I Know Where I'm Going! seemed almost to write itself.
It included many elements close to the filmmakers' hearts:
Pressburger's concern for the fate that shapes
individual lives and his belief that "kindness rules the world, not money,"
combined with Powell's deep love for the Scottish islands and his technical
virtuosity, here required to combine location filming and studio special
effects for a spectacular whirlpool sequence which brings together all the
film's themes
-- moral, mythic and elemental
-- in a thrilling climax.
There was also a more personal reason for Pressburger to look into the
future that awaited a young woman on the threshold of post-war life,
and for the snapshot prologue showing Joan's determination from a very
early age.
His daughter Angela had been born in 1941.
For Powell, it was a chance to return to his beloved Scotland, and to fall
in love with Pamela Brown during the filming.
The Archers, as their company was called, had long wanted to work with
one of the leading young actresses of the time, Wendy Hiller.
Now she was perfect for the headstrong careerist Joan, who must learn
to follow her heart rather than her head.
It was a topical theme, perhaps even more then the Archers could have
realized in late 1944. For after nearly six years of war, Britain was stirring
with a new idealism. Countless men and women in uniform and in the war
industries dreamed of a fairer world after victory.
When party politics returned in mid-1945 after the wartime National
Coalition, Churchill made clear his opposition to more of the social
reforms which had already been introduced during the war.
The result of the "khaki election" was a resounding vote for
socialism and a rejection of Churchill's paternalism. Powell and Pressburger
were no revolutionaries, but they were in tune with the times.
No other British film of the period captures so well the widespread hostility
towards those who had profited from the war and the determination to create
a new world based on equality and honesty.
Torquil (Roger Livesey) is the traditional "Laird" of the
island, who has been fighting for his country, yet forced by poverty to
rent his birthright to "the rich man."
His re-education of Joan is the turning of Britain towards a "New Jerusalem."
But the Archers wanted to move rather than moralise.
Even more effectively than A Canterbury Tale,
I Know Where I'm Going!
succeeds in spinning a web of myth and evocative symbolism around its central
search for self-discovery. Scenes like the traditional Ceildhe, where Torquil
translates a Gaelic song to Joan which first puts into words what neither
of them has admitted, and the eerily-lit bedroom where Joan first admits
her
doubts about the marriage to Sir Robert, have a rare cinematic intensity.
Powell and Pressburger had yet to launch into the glorious expressionism
that would lead to The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann,
but they were already reaching far beyond conventional realism.
From Joan's "Tartan dream" as she travels north to Scotland, to the epic
drama of the Corryvreckan whirlpool
(inspired by Cecil B. DeMille's parting of the Red Sea in
The Ten Commandments), I Know Where I'm Going!
boldy defies the sober style of much World War II cinema.
It is this which makes it distinctively modern. Martin
Scorsese recalls first seeing it just before he started shooting
Raging Bull
and being "overwhelmed by its illustration of love laced with mysticism."
Modern, yet also timeless. At the end, Joan and Torquil emerge purified
from the tests they have undergone,
like the lovers of a latter-day Magic Flute.
-- Ian Christie
Credits
Written, Produced and Directed: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Director of Photography: Erwin Hillier
Editor: John Seabourne
Music: Allan Gray
Art Director: Alfred Junge
Transfer
New digital transfer manufactured from a 35mm preservation
print recently manufactured by the British Film Institute from the original
nitrate elements. Approved by director of photography Erwin Hillier.
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