I Know Where I'm Going!
Reviewed in February 2010
Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Cast: Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey, Pamela Brown, Finlay Currie, John Laurie, George Carney, Nancy Price,
Murdo Morrison, Margot Fitzsimons, Catherine Lacey, Jean Cadell, Valentine Dyall, Donald Strachan, Duncan McIntyre, Petula Clark, Walter Hudd. Screenplay: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Infant crawl, hitching ride with milkman instead of bus; she's 25 and one thing hasn't changed: she still knows where she's going;
WH just has such a viciously HARD face; 341; dad is embarrassed to be in a dancehall where the waiter knows her "usual" drink;
Takes a day and a night to get to his island, Kiloran, in the Hebrides; (travel under chirpy "IKWIG" phonograph track;
"Do you, Joan Webster, take Consolidated Chemical Industries to be your lawfully wedded husband?";
Train pulls through tunnel of plaid, breast-shaped hill; tophats puffing like train-engine smokestacks;
Of the MacLeans: "But they'll all be dead now, or in New Zealand"; some of the misty seaside misty stuff seems self-conscious to no great effect, and even some blocking confusion;
Catriona: "I haven't heard any intelligent female nonsense for months!"; pagan face in the overhead lamp fixture;
"They're not poor, they just haven't got money" / "It's the same thing" / "Oh, no, it's quite different";
WH wants to sit at "separate tables" at lucnh!; overweening score - back off, I'm not THAT charmed;
Stark, blown-out whtie of the lamps, against her face, leading to the supernatural victory of a romantic CU of WH;
pre-Distant Voices, Still Lives, et al.; "Your airs and graces and your heart of stone - why shoudl you think htat our lives ont' matter at all?";
""I'm on teh brink of losing everything I've ever wanted, ever since I culd want anything" - but the problem is we don't CARE;
"She's as stubborn as a mule"; Catriona: "She's running away from you!"; close, storm, dead engine; marrooned;
whirlpool forming?; CUs of engine work; boat needs constant bailing; a cold return: "So! You're back."; Donald Crispy;
"While you've been messing 'round in boats, a new chapter's been written in the history of falconry!";
20lb fox; Bazinian shot of falcon being called to fox; "Breaking my neck to marry a rich man"; C: "id swim to Oban for 10 pounds";
I thought you were perfeclty happy without money; "What else can we do?"; burbling, merry, galompking music, though at least a bit restrained;
WH wants RL to kiss her before she meets her boat; more musical insanity, though they part ways;
the haunted castle; RL dares to go inside; female storyteller echoing through the castel as he explores, gradually muffling;
Three pipers announce WH's return; (we only ever glimpsed her fiance the one time); here she's striding up the road;
"I'd rather swim in the sea than in a swimming pool"; Curse: "Never shall he leave it a free man, but he shall be chained to a woman
till the end of his days, and he shall die in his chains" - to the Isle of Mull, and to true Scotsmen everywhere;
B+
