Alec B
Leave it to Powell and Pressburger to take the romance genre and show that it can absolutely afford filmmakers the chance to be innovative and tell a compelling character based story. Wendy Hiller gives an all time great performance here.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/10/24
Full Review
Matthew B
Joan Webster (Wendy Hillier) is the woman who knows where she is going. She always has done. Spoilt, selfish, grasping and still likeable, she has been used to getting her own way since she was a child.
As an adult she has not improved much. Joan wants the best of everything. She wears the best clothes, and takes her embarrassed father to the best restaurant. Right now our determined heroine intends to marry her fiancé, a man who is nearly as old as her father, but who is also one of the richest men in England.
All that remains is to travel from her home in Manchester to the island of Kiloran in the Hebrides for the wedding (is her father not invited?), and Joan has the whole journey planned out meticulously.
Made a year after A Canterbury Tale, this film offered to do for Scotland what the earlier movie did for England. While it contains less of the cultural, historical, spiritual, literary and contemporary context of the previous movie, I Know Where I'm Going offers a similar idyllic account of simple rustic life. Characters speak in Gaelic. Seals sing. Houses are hardly separable from farmyards with animals running around the corridors.
The people fish and bathe in the waters, and are at ease shooting and skinning rabbits. The latter is an activity in which the urban Joan fails to excel, naturally. We meet a falconer called Colonel Barnstable (played by Captain C.W.R Knight, who was himself a famous falconer), and a subplot develops about whether local sheep have been killed by a lost bird of his.
The provincial feel of the movie is enhanced by the choice of music. A number of traditional Scottish songs are played. At one point, the characters attend a ceilidh, a traditional Scottish gathering, which is held to celebrate a wedding. Indeed the dances were choreographed by John Laurie, a regular actor in Michael Powell movies, who here plays the groom.
Again as with A Canterbury Tale, what is important here is atmosphere rather than plot. Like Sergeant Bob Johnson in the earlier movie, Joan's progress to her destination is suspended, and indeed the plot of the movie is seemingly suspended too, moving forward slowly, allowing us time to drink in the beauty and local customs of the Hebrides setting.
I Know Where I'm Going was commercially successful on its release, but is now an overlooked Michael Powell work. This is a shame, as it contains much that is admirable. The script was written in a week, and yet it was of such good quality that Paramount used it as an example of the perfect screenplay to be shown to struggling writers.
In an age where movies so often demand excitement and action of some kind, I Know Where I'm Going may seem frustratingly slow to some. Its pace is certainly leisurely, but that is where the film's charm lies. The pleasure does not lie in the destination that the plot is heading to. It hardly even derives from the journey itself. It lies in the stops that we take along the way there, and the variety of minor incidents that are observed while we rest there.
I wrote a longer appreciation (with spoilers) on my blog page if you would like to read more: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/i-know-where-im-going-1945/
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
08/25/23
Full Review
isla s
This is a somewhat slow and partly dull watch, although it has a nice setting and some reasonably nice characters. The Scottish stereotypes did make me cringe but at least the people were friendly enough - most of them anyway. Its a reasonable watch - not one I'd actively recommend but its ok.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
If you don't find this movie captivatingly beautiful and romantic, your soul is dead. Granted Joan is incredibly frustrating but her world has been turned upside down. She comes around in the end. I love this movie, every damn bit of it.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/26/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Leave it to Powell and Pressburger to take the unfairly maligned romance genre and show that it can absolutely afford filmmakers the chance to be innovative and tell a compelling character based story. Wendy Hiller gives an all time great performance here.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/13/23
Full Review
William L
Powell and Pressburger seem to stick to pretty safe territory most of the time, opting for some sort of nostalgic element and building up sympathetic storylines; in I Know Where I'm Going!, an ambitious woman is set to marry for money, but circumstances strand her en route with a man of lesser means but great character, all the while surrounded by the charming, simple existence of the Hebrides. Pretty standard stuff, though done competently with a well-designed structure using just the right amount of characters and supporting scenes to create enough of a narrative to justify the character development in Hiller's Joan Webster. There's plenty of shots of the local flavor to build up the charm, though most Scottish films of the period seem to carry a chip on their shoulder and feel the need to constantly reinforce their identity, bringing out kilts, whisky, and bagpipes just to make sure the audience remembers that the English are tossers. IKWIG manages to take it a step further by really dedicating itself to incorporating a substantial amount of the Scottish countryside instead of just laying on particularly thick accents. I was actually invested in the recurring falconry subplot as well, it was like a little serial woven into the script. Overall, the film has a tight runtime and a purity to it that causes some to call it a masterpiece of romantic film, but I'm more on the side of 'pretty good'. (3.5/5)
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/16/21
Full Review
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