181. I Know Where I'm Going (1945)

Directed by Powell and Pressburger

Synopsis

Woman is getting married to rich man who for some reason is at some god-forsaken island in the inner Hebrides. Of course she never gets there, first because there is too little wind, then there is too much wind, then there is the dashing Richard Livesey who is penniless but not penisless.

Review

This is the second Powell and Pressburger film on the list and also the second film with Richard Livesey... and this film suffers tremendously from comparison with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. That film was a staggering masterpiece, this film is just quite good.

The story is really secondary to the whole thing, I would much rather focus on the pretty nifty location filming which is pretty spectacular for the time, with a whole film crew actually going all the way to the ass end of the universe to make this film, and the dialogue, which as per usual in Powell and Pressburger is polished to perfection.

This film keeps the tradition of making a showcase of British Eccentricity (tm), with the secondary characters being as, if not more interesting than the main ones which aren't as eccentric in order to make them more immediately accessible. So... it is a good film, it is not an heartbreaking work of staggering genius like Blimp, but it is perfectly serviceable.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

One of the most complex scenes is the small boat battling through the Corryvreckan whirlpool. This was a clever combination of footage shot at Corryvreckan between the Hebridean islands of Scarba and Jura and the Gray Dogs (Bealach a'Choin Ghlais) between Scarba and Lunga. There are some long distance shots looking down over the area, shot from one of the islands. There are some middle distance and close-up shots that were made from a small boat with a hand-held camera. There were some model shots, done in the tank at the studio. These had gelatin added to the water so that it would hold its shape better and would look better when scaled up. Usually the way that waves break and the size of water drops is a give-away for model shots done in a tank. Then there were also the close-up shots of the people in the boat. These were all done in the studio, with a boat on gimbals being rocked in all directions by some hefty studio hands while other studio hands threw buckets of water at them. These were filmed with the shots made from the boat with the hand-held camera projected behind them. Even then, there was further trickery where they joined together some of the long and middle distance shots with those made in the tank in a single frame.

No clip of the film online, but here is one guy singing the theme: