I Know Where I'm Going! (Full Screen)

"I know where I'm going,

I know who's going with me,"

A young lady (Windy Hiller) pretty much knows what she wants in life. On her way to her wedding on a remote Scottish island she is delayed long enough to experience a different way of life and a reality that she was never exposed to. Here she finds different values and the difference between real nobility and the early version of plastic money. She is overwhelmed by her new discovery and the man (Roger Livesey) who introduced her to it. Now she must desperately escape or be lost forever in this different world.

I was surprised to find that a young girl in the movie was Petula Clark.

There are advantages to having a movie with a story that is not based on a book. You can enjoy the story for what it is and not have to compare. However this may make a good play. In the Criterion extras you will find speculation on the pro's and con's of remaking the movie.

This film is impressive on its own but the Criterion treatment adds many fascinating dimensions that make you have to re-watch the film just to se the parts that you missed while paying attention though the plotline and scenery.

There is a commentary track that covers the entire film. A behind the scenes stills that even has a commentary. Home movies add to the information about the designers of the story and producers. There is a section from "The edge of the World." A great insight and a different way off looking at the story are found in "I Know Where I'm Going! Revisited" a 30 minute making of. The location photo essay allows you to see if the color is what you imagined (maybe better).

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

This movie is one of the more interesting that I have seen. The story follows a woman on the way to her wedding to a wealthy man on an island in Scotland. Inclement weather prevents her from taking a boat to the island and she subsequently meets a naval officer and begins to have feelings for him.

The film has excellent scenery of Mull Island in Scotland.
The DVD special features include a revisit to the sites featured in the film.
There is also a theatrical trailer. There is feature length audio commentary by Ian Christie. There are several home movies made by Director Michael Powell, narrated by his widow Thelma who also narrated a slideshow of production photos on the DVD.

There area also excerpts from Michael Powell's "The Edge of The World" a documentary "Return to the Edge of the World" and another documentary "I Know Where I'm Going! Revisited" by Mark Cousins.

IKWIG (as its creative team of Powell and Pressburger dubbed it) was made on a black-and-white stock right after WWII, when technicolor film and equipment were temporarily unavailable. It was the tale of a London-based woman who has always known what she's wanted all her life, and has decided to marry a wealthy, nice, but elderly business tycoon. ("You can't marry Consolidated Chemical Industries!" sputters her father. "Can't I?" is her reply.) He has rented a sprawling castle on a distant isle of the remote, nature-claimed Hebrides Islands, off the coast of Scotland, and she's traveling to meet him for the wedding, there. Unfortunately, the weather doesn't cooperate, and she's stuck for days one island short of her goal, where she encounters endless local traditions, people, and scenery, along with the young Laird of Killoran. Her desperation to achieve her goal nearly causes the death of several people, and has a profound effect on her understanding of the culture she's dropped into from London.

I would venture to call IKWIG the uber-chick film. It has several of the qualities that succeed so well in romance novels/film making: a self-reliant, intelligent heroine; a rugged hero who is at first perceived as the antagonist; a growth in understanding about the world around her, that allows ultimately for a complete change of POV in the heroine. It is that rare creature, a romance film that isn't a romantic comedy. It has some brilliantly inventive comic moments, especially (and significantly) before the film moves leaves England--like the heroine's dream sequence as she sleeps aboard a train, climaxing in a distant shot from above that has the hills covered in tartan as the train passes into Scotland--but that isn't the focus. (If anything, it is a bit of magical theater that represents a flight *away* from reality, showing us the early values of the heroine; just as the culture she finds in the Hebrides becomes a massive section of magical theater which, less brilliant, hammers away at her preconceptions both through its human and elemental aspects.)

However, there are many things about IKWIG that lift it above the chick film genre presented by such horrific stuff as Scriptless in Seattle. Powell was in love with the Hebrides, and, unusually for a fictional film of this period, IKWIG is filled with the culture of its surroundings. There's no sense of embarassing "types" as in so many Hollywood films-on-location, but rather more than a dozen subsidiary characters, none of them models, who fit naturally into their assigned roles, with or without dialog, and contribute to the film's sense of otherness. The writing is unsentimental and never cloys, but brings out many of the local traditions, superstitions, and myths surrounding the Hebrides in a natural and seemingly impromptu fashion; so that when we attend a party given in honor of the sixtieth wedding anniversary of the Laird of the Campbells, we actually see three bagpipers playing as the floor shakes under the heels of dancers; and we witness an extremely good amateur a capella group sing a glee. IGWIG takes its time to give us the full value of these things, and we're left grateful for the sense of connection. How different it feels than Pretty Lady, with a cliched plot hitched to endless shopping sprees and "let's do lunch" dates.

The extraordinary beauty of the environment was captured live without special effects--in fact, Powell said they never used a smoke machine; all their fog, brilliant sunshine, gales, and scenery were natural. Everything save the interiors (and shots with the Laird; Livesey had a commitment that kept him in London) were made on location, near a village of several hundred inhabitants which was largest settlement on the isle. Erwin Hillier, the editor on the film, was a student of Fritz Lang, and much preferred the heavily contrasted depth photography he'd been trained in to the soft-edged, romantic tone of Hollywood, or the stolidly outlined b&w of contemporary British films.

The script is subtle, rich, and impeccably characterized, with a lot going on beneath the surface. (For example, it's a film about growing up emotionally; of coming to terms with the world around you, and determining what values are real. Yet on another level, there's an unstated three-way contrast among the heroine, an ambitious, educated, lower-class girl, the tycoon and his new money, waiting out the war safely in his island castle, and the traditional upper-middle class landowners and gentry of the Hebrides, impoverished by war deprivations but quietly, heroically making do.) The acting is flawless, without any of the "beautiful people" syndrome in evidence which has so dogged cinema over the years. A comparative failure upon its release (critics and audience weren't in the mood for mystical landscapes and romance after WWII), it's racked up numerous awards and a very large following, since. Martin Scorsese speaks of it as among his favorite films. Although a few stylistic points creak with age (notably the use of music in the background behind dialog in some sections), this is a powerful, lyrical, intimate film with enormous replay value, thanks to the great subtlety of its images and performances. If you're looking for the perfect film to see with a date, or a loved one, consider this. Even if you're not, consider it, anyway. You won't regret it.