175: I Know Where I'm Going!

UK  88m  Dir: Michael Powell and William Pressburger

Original Screenplay

Whilst this film has got a good reputation, it's generally regarded as writer/director duo Pressburger and Powell's least original film and is a relatively simplistic romance. 

Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) travels from her home in Manchester to marry a wealthy and much older aristocrat in the Hebrides. Due to poor weather, she finds herself stuck on the Isle of Mull and finds herself attracted to the penniless Laird Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey). 

This may have been a mid-40s film but it almost feels like it could be twenty years older. The plot is simply about a woman realising love is more important than money and there isn't much more to it than that. Everything speaks in very old-fashioned English or Scottish accents and were it not for the technical side of things you'd assume this was made in the 1920s. 

There is a moment or two which is more interesting. When Joan begins her journey up to Scotland she has a dream where she marries a whole company which is really well done and clearly shows that Joan is far more interested in her fiancee's wealth than anything else. It's really the only time in the film that Pressburger and Powell's originality shines. 

On the whole, this doesn't do much that is technically very clever but there's a sequence where Joan makes an ill-advised decision to travel through a storm across the sea which is pretty impressive, with real shots of Corryvreckan Whirpool combined with model shots, studio shots featuring the actors and some frames combining long and middle distance shots together. It's a brilliantly well-achieved sequence that stands up really well. 

As I said, this film is highly-regarded but it didn't do much for me. I found it quite dull with Joan just moping around an island and refusing to admit to her feelings. There's no real drama until the end and neither is there any emotion. Sure, there's some decent dialogue with some genuinely good lines and the film is well made but the plot is thin and unoriginal. 

Whilst there's much to admire here, for me at least the weak plot doesn't reach the heights of other areas of the production.