Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1945)
I’d seen it before but that must have been pre-2008 (otherwise there would already be an Old Yorker note on it) – probably in a Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger season at BFI. They’re now running a new Archers retrospective, through to the end of 2023: it was good to kick off by renewing acquaintance with I Know Where I’m Going! The film sits between A Canterbury Tale (1944) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) in the Powell-Pressburger filmography; it might be considered formally and thematically conventional beside both those pictures. Yet this must be one of the most imaginative and satisfying romantic comedies ever made in Britain. Unusually in the genre, I Know Where I’m Going! is visually exciting as well as emotionally engaging.
The title expresses the confident (self-)belief of the film’s protagonist, Joan Webster. A prologue, complete with arch commentary by a male voiceover, summarises Joan’s strong-willed progress from infancy (she even crawls with a purpose) through schooldays (she gets a lift home while other girls wait for the bus) to young womanhood (she calls the tune with boys dating her). In her mid-twenties, Joan (Wendy Hiller) is a middle-class working girl but not for much longer. In a restaurant-bar, where she and her preferred drink (gin and Dubonnet) are well known to the staff, she meets her anxiously staid bank-manager father (George Carney) to inform him she’s about to be married. When he asks to whom, Joan hands him her works pass from ‘CCI’ (Consolidated Chemical Industries): the pass shows just her name and that of Sir Robert Bellinger, head of CCI and, as the baffled Mr Webster reminds her, ‘one of the wealthiest men in England’. He is nevertheless Joan’s intended; the wedding will take place on the island that Bellinger owns, Kiloran (based on Colonsay) in the Hebrides. Her astounded but attentive father sees Joan off on an overnight train. As soon as she’s in her sleeper cabin, she carefully removes from her luggage a wedding dress that she hangs beside her bed.
From the start, Wendy Hiller achieves a miraculous balance: she vividly conveys her character’s often infuriating egocentrism but makes you root for her. The screenplay by Powell and Pressburger achieves a fine balance, too. It’s very clear from the opening scenes that Joan Webster needs to be taken down a peg or two: she is and she isn’t in the course of what follows. Soon after Joan’s train sets off north, the Scottish folk ballad ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ plays on the soundtrack. The song is sparingly used, not returning until the film’s closing credits, but its lines ‘I know who I love/The dear knows who I’ll marry[1]’ are significant throughout. Joan is in quite the reverse position: she knows who she’ll marry, for huge financial advantage, but not who she loves – the story consists essentially of her finding that out. Bad weather postpones the last leg of Joan’s journey, a boat crossing to Kiloran from the Isle of Mull. She has no option but to wait on Mull for the high winds to subside. She stays at ‘the big house’, in the company of its owner, Catriona Potts (Pamela Brown), and two of Catriona’s friends – Colonel Barnstaple (Captain C W R Knight), a fanatical falconer, and naval officer Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), back in Scotland on a few days’ shore leave and also Kiloran-bound.
Soon after arriving on Mull, Joan is told by a local about nearby Moy Castle (ancestral home of ‘the MacLaines of Erraig’, from whom Catriona is descended) and the ‘terrible strong curse’ attached to it, which forbids the lairds of Kiloran ever to cross the castle’s threshold. Next day, Joan, escorted by Torquil, sets out for Tobermory in search of a telephone. En route they come upon the ruins of Moy Castle; she’s keen to go inside but he refuses to do so. When she points out that the curse applies only to the laird of Kiloran, Joan discovers that’s just who Torquil is – and that Robert Bellinger doesn’t own the island but has leased it from him. In Tobermory, Joan is able to phone her fiancé from the post office. With a gale imminent and a sea crossing still out of the question, Bellinger advises Joan to stay with a business associate called Robinson and his wife – ‘the only people worth knowing’ in the area – but Joan opts instead for a night in the Western Isles Hotel, where Torquil also stays. The weather’s no better the following day so, without telling Torquil, she checks out of the hotel and moves on to the Robinsons (Valentine Dyall and Catherine Lacey). She accompanies them on a visit to Achnacroish, the home of Mrs Crozier (Nancy Price); to Joan’s surprise, the house guests include Torquil. At the hotel, he and Joan not only stayed in separate rooms but lunched at separate tables – at her request: when Mrs Crozier introduces them, Torquil tactfully affects never to have met Joan. Whereas Sir Robert Bellinger is never anything more than a braying, bumptious voice (supplied by Norman Shelley) at the end of a phone connection, it seems everywhere that Joan goes on Mull, she sees Torquil. That night, Achnacroish hosts a ceilidh to celebrate the diamond wedding of Mrs Crozier’s head gardener and his wife. Torquil and Joan spend much of the evening together.
As a set piece and an emotional centrepiece, the ceilidh in I Know Where I’m Going! may well have inspired the ceilidh in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983). It’s worth comparing the two films in other ways. Like Joan Webster, Peter Riegert’s ‘Mac’ MacIntyre in Local Hero comes to Scotland on a money-making mission; the place and the people encountered by these cultural outsiders cause them to think again. While the locals both in Forsyth’s Ferness and on Mull include some wily characters, Powell and Pressburger’s Hebrideans represent a different set of values from Forsyth’s villagers – most of whom are as keen to get a piece of the action as the energy conglomerate that sends Mac to Scotland. Although money and privilege are frequently discussed in I Know Where I’m Going!, the local consensus seems to be that the first doesn’t matter and the second encourages foolish behaviour. On the bus ride to Tobermory with Joan, Torquil is recognised and warmly greeted by other passengers, to whom he’s known as ‘Kiloran’. Unaware who Joan is, they disparage what Robert Bellinger is up to: getting a swimming ‘pond’ installed even though he’s living near the sea; ordering supplies of salmon that he could catch himself. Telephone calls at the post office cost ninepence each; when Joan tries to pay with a note, the postmistress (Jean Cadell) can’t change it; Torquil hands over in coins the shilling and sixpence owing. As they leave, he explains to Joan that the postmistress ‘wouldn’t see a pound note from one pensions day to another’:
Joan: People around here are very poor, I suppose.
Torquil: Not poor. They just haven’t got money.
Joan: It’s the same thing.
Torquil: Oh, no, something quite different.
These islanders aren’t immune to financial temptation, though. Joan continues to try and fail to persuade the local boatman Ruairidh Mhór (Finlay Currie) to take her to Kiloran, despite the appalling weather; she has better luck in bribing Kenny (Murdo Morrison), his young assistant and sweetheart of Ruairidh’s daughter, Bridie (Margot Fitzsimons), to do the job: Joan’s offer of twenty pounds is enough, Kenny reckons, for him to marry Bridie and buy a half-share in her father’s boat.
The two films’ visual schemes are also very different and, as you’d expect in an Archers picture, more daring here, wonderful as Chris Menges’s cinematography for Local Hero is. The beauty of Highland landscapes and the Ferness seascape, not to mention the night sky, cast their spell on Mac. Erwin Hillier’s black-and-white images in I Know Where I’m Going! create something no less mysterious but increasingly threatening, too. The climax is the sea voyage to Kiloran that Joan insists on making without further delay. As she already knows from Torquil, this means negotiating the perilous Corryvreckan whirlpool, north-east of Kiloran. There’s a legend attached to this also: it’s more involved than the Moy Castle curse so I’ll forego the details here. But I will quote generously from Wikipedia’s astonishing description of how this episode, a combination of location shooting and studio footage, was filmed:
‘There are some long-distance shots looking down over the area, shot from one of the [Hebridean] islands. … There are some middle-distance and close-up shots that were made from a small boat with a hand-held camera. … There were some model shots, done in the tank at [Denham Studios]. These had gelatin added to the water, so that it would hold its shape better and would look better when scaled up. … The close-up shots of the people in the boat were all done in the studio, with a boat on gimbals being rocked in all directions by some hefty studio hands while others threw buckets of water at them. These were filmed with the shots made from the boat with the hand-held camera projected behind them. … Further trickery joined some of the long- and middle-distance shots together with those made in the tank into a single frame. …’
Torquil angrily tries to dissuade Joan from embarking on the sea trip but she’s adamant so he joins her and Kenny in the boat – and yet:
‘[Roger] Livesey was not able to travel to Scotland because he was performing in a West End play …at the time of filming. Thus all his scenes were shot in the studio at Denham, and a double (coached by Livesey in London) was used in all of his scenes shot in Scotland. These were then mixed so that the same scene would often have a middle-distance shot of the double and then a close-up of Livesey, or a shot of the double’s back followed by a shot showing Livesey’s face.’
Quite some ‘trickery’ (and ‘coaching’) …
Joan’s reckless determination to reach Kiloran, risking others’ lives as well as her own, is enraging and would be intolerable if we didn’t realise that, by this stage, her resolve isn’t simply a matter of sticking to her original plan of action: as Catriona perceives, Joan now needs not only to get to her destination but to get away from Torquil, with whom she’s falling in love. The boat’s engine is flooded but, as they enter the whirlpool, Torquil manages in the nick of time to restart the boat’s engine, and gets them safely back to Mull. In the crisis at Corryvreckan, Torquil yells at Joan to keep bailing and to pray. We know from earlier scenes that she prays regularly, and selfishly. ‘Your credit must be good in heaven,’ Torquil tells her as the boat’s motor starts. Her exultant, pleased-with-herself reply is ‘They know a good prayer when they hear one!’ It’s one of the most satisfying aspects of I Know Where I’m Going! that the heroine isn’t in the end thoroughly transformed – but she does want for herself someone and something different from before. Because Torquil and his values are so much more likeable than Bellinger’s, they make Joan more likeable, too.
Next morning – in fine, benign weather – Joan and Torquil say goodbye and go their separate ways. He ventures into Moy Castle, where the origins and full implications of the curse are revealed. Any laird of Kiloran who enters the castle ‘never shall he leave it a free man: he shall be chained to a woman till the end of his days’. Torquil/Kiloran hears the sounds of pipes: in the road below the castle, the bagpipers due to perform at Joan’s wedding to Bellinger and whom we’ve already seen in action at the ceilidh, are proceeding towards Moy, with Joan marching behind them. She runs to meet Torquil, they embrace and express their true feelings, and walk off down the road together, Torquil duly and contentedly enchained.
Roger Livesey’s gentleness and witty restraint are beautifully complementary to Wendy Hiller’s assertive, insistent charm. Hiller is splendid in Joan’s final, loving outburst; Livesey emanates authentic goodness. These are marvellous performances. The leads are well supported by Pamela Brown as the intuitive, melancholy Catriona. The comedy business around Colonel Barnstaple’s golden eagle – also called Torquil because the bird reminds Barnstaple of the man – is pretty broad; ditto the acting of C W R Knight, a real-life falconry expert. Still, the Colonel’s obliviousness to the perilous boat trip via Corryvreckan is funny: when the exhausted Torquil returns to Catriona’s house, Barnstaple wants only to tell him about the exploits of his avian namesake (played by Captain Knight’s own golden eagle, Mr Ramshaw). Petula Clark, twelve years old at the time, is excellent in the small role of the Robinsons’ daughter, Cheril, who doesn’t miss a trick. There are a few dodgy and/or effortful Scottish accents in evidence but John Laurie, as the son of the diamond wedding couple, is the real thing. Laurie has lovely animation in the ceilidh sequence, which he also choreographed.
I Know Where I’m Going! was released in Britain in November 1945; within the film, the war is still very much ongoing. Torquil’s first appearance is in his naval uniform. When Joan meets her father at the start, there’s a crowd of soldiers at the bar; she enthuses about the remoteness of Kiloran, from which the war is ‘a million miles away’. A correspondent with this website last year drew my attention to an imminent online showing of a recently restored version of the film by Martin Scorsese’s foundation; Scorsese gave a recorded introduction to this BFI screening, in which he talked about the restoration and his love of the work. As a rule, exclamation marks in movie titles are a bad sign (Boom!, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Mother!, to name a few), though not invariably so (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Dear Comrades!). In the roll-call of distinguished exceptions to the rule, I Know Where I’m Going! ranks as one of the very best.
24 October 2023
[1] The word ‘dear’ seems to be a kind of abbreviated euphemism here – replacing ‘devil’, short for ‘dear Lord’.
