The central romance of I Know Where I’m Going! may be a bit of a drip, but swirling around it are filmmaking flourishes of the sort that the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would lavish on the cinema throughout the 1940s, under the name of The Archers.
Released after their ambitious biopic satire The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and just before the masterful, three-film run of A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes, I Know Where I’m Going! eschews their signature Technicolor for brooding black and white. All the better to capture the dark waves and gloomy skies of the Hebrides, a group of islands off the coast of Scotland. Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) has come here to marry an older business tycoon on one of the remote isles. Storms, however, strand her, so she makes do with the company of naval officer Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), a local man on leave.
Hiller and Livesey have little chemistry. Livesey’s Torquil is genial enough, while Hiller’s Joan never remains off-putting until last-minute, unconvincing change of mind. We see evidence over the opening credits that Joan has been independent and headstrong since she was a child, yet by the time we meet her as an adult she registers mostly as an avaricious, aspiringly snobby social climber. It’s never quite clear what Livesey’s Torquil—a comfortable-enough landower who is proud of the region’s rough-and-tumble humility—sees in her.
Yet none of that matters when Powell and Pressburger, working with cinematographer Erwin Hillier, start experimenting with the imagery. Even before Joan makes it to the Hebrides, she has a swirling dream—all filmed through the cellophane protecting her wedding dress—in which shots of chugging trains, the churning machines of her fiance’s factory, and her father dressed as a priest are all superimposed on top of each other. Once among the islands, characters are filmed against the sea in dramatic silhouettes; meanwhile a climactic, whirlpool action sequence evokes natural terror without a single digital effect. When such elements are complemented by equally compelling characters, The Archers are at their best, but that’s unfortunately not quite the case here.
(7/22/2024)
