Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger - 'I Know Where I'm Going!' (1945)

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Synopsis:
A young woman heads for a Scottish island where she plans to marry an old industrialist for his money. But bad weather prevents her reaching him, and she finds herself falling under the spell of the local laird.

Review:
In I Know Where I’m Going, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created a modern folktale. Not an escapist fairy story but a modern myth, complete with hero, maiden, a curse, and a difficult trial that pits them against death. Despite its wartime setting (it was made in 1945), I Know Where I’m Going is not a period piece. By daring to mix a love story with fantasy elements leavened by near-documentary footage, the film has the timelessness of a legend.

I Know Where I’m Going opens with a montage of Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), who from toddlerdom to young womanhood has no doubt about where she’s going. On the eve of her wedding journey, she has a swanky supper with her father (George Carney), a Babbitty bank manager ill at ease with his daughter’s high-flying tastes. She announces her impending marriage to Sir Robert Bellinger, many years her senior and head of Consolidated Chemical Industries, where she is employed. It’s one of the film’s strengths that Joan’s pretensions and airs seem silly rather than annoying, the foolish posturings of a young woman bound on bettering herself. Her motherlessness plays no small role in this; her obstinate self-sufficiency evidently compensates for her father’s meekness and her mother’s absence. Joan bears a resemblance to Katherine Hepburn characters, but, fortunately, Hiller has none of Hepburn’s cloying grit, nor the sentimentality. Like Pamela Brown, the other female lead, Hiller shows us a flinty, quick-witted woman who can do without a man but would rather not.

The film relies a great deal on offscreen events and places: neither Potts nor Bellinger appear; an annual folk festival in Oban is lovingly detailed but not shown; and, perhaps most boldly, Kiloran itself is never seen. Paradoxically, these unseen matters enrich what is shown, revealing a great deal about the characters’ values and beliefs without resorting to straight exposition. Like a folk story, the film embroiders its own story with bits and pieces of other tales.

Joan remains stranded across from Kiloran, and Torquil, deeply attracted to her, tries to help. They make contact with Bellinger, whose braying over the airwaves exposes him as a blowhard. In the meantime, Joan has discovered that Bellinger merely rents the island; Torquil is the hereditary but straitened Laird of Kiloran; and even what appears to her to be irrational superstition — Torquil’s refusal to enter the local castle because of its reputed curse on the men of his family — becomes understandable as she spends more time in his unaffected company. He respects his traditions much as he respects the untamable weather of the islands, happy to live within their limits. Like the tartanned hills of Joan’s dream, the curse, potentially a hokey touch, becomes part of the movie’s lore.

Powell and Pressburger composed the film from a series of sleights of hand. Already mentioned are the fantastical dream sequence and the cobbled-together special effects of the whirlpool. But most spectacular was Powell’s work with Livesey. Bound by contract to appear in a play in London during the entire filming, Livesey never ventured beyond its suburbs. Instead, he trained a double to mimic his movements and stance for the location shots, with Powell shooting close-ups in a studio or just outside London. In A Life in Movies, Powell jubilantly admits: “I’m not sure, but I think it is one of the cleverest things I ever did in movies.” What makes this and Powell’s other work, alone and in collaboration with Pressburger, so compulsively watchable was his delight in using film to do the impossible. The alchemy he performed was always in the service of the story and the audience. Powell gloried in the medium’s abracadabra qualities. Folktale characters triumph over fear, withstanding a test to discover a truth or real love. With its emphasis on moderation over consumption, on eccentricity over conformity, and, finally, on authenticity over posing, the film continues a folkloric tradition. It argues for intuition and destiny rather than planning and strategy, against shiny novelties in favor of the genuine and enduring, and, finally, for not being too certain of anything — including where one is going. Powell combined the audacity of the con man with real respect for his viewers, rooting his somewhat incredible story in the realities of Hebridean landscape and indigenous residents. In the film, he and his team present an improbable blend of the specific and the archetypal, the result an impeccable delight.

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Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger - 'I Know Where I'm Going!' (1945)

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