32 I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

****
Country: UK
Director: Michael Powell


In the 1940s Michael Powell and his writing, producing, and directing partner Emeric Pressburger created a string of films of astounding ambition and scope. In their complex narrative structures and weighty themes, sophisticated use of color, creative integration of music and image, and bravura application of technical resources to create cinema illusion, these films are a series of masterpieces nearly unequaled in motion picture history. Yet in the middle of making dazzling movies like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger concocted a seemingly simple little black-and-white romance that is in its modest way as great an achievement as those more adventurous pictures. The film is I Know Where I'm Going! and of all the Powell and Pressburger movies, it is the gentlest and most charming. Michael Powell called it "the sweetest film we ever made."

The film opens with a short prologue/credits sequence that establishes the main character, Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller). We briefly see Joan as a toddler, child, and young woman who always "knew where she was going," a headstrong person who from her earliest years knew what she wanted and showed single-minded determination to get it. Now as an adult she has determined to marry a rich man and live a life of comfort and has become engaged to her older employer, the industrial magnate Sir Robert Bellinger. Within minutes after the film begins she is on her way to her wedding in Scotland, where Bellinger has established a wartime residence on the island of Kiloran off the west coast. Everything on the journey goes smoothly until the final leg, when she must take a boat from the island of Mull to Kiloran, for the harbor is fog-bound and no boats are able to operate. Joan now finds herself temporarily stranded in a small Scottish village, to the London sophisticate as alien a place as a foreign country.

Joan also finds herself in the company of a young Scottish naval officer home for a few days' leave, Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesy), also on his way to Kiloran and stranded until the fog lifts. During Joan's stay on Mull, Torquil becomes her guide to the local scenery and culture, introducing her to his friends Catriona (Pamela Brown), who has known Torquil since childhood, and Col. Barnstaple (C.K.W. Knight), an eccentric falconer. He also introduces Joan to other local inhabitants and, outfitted in traditional attire including the kilt, accompanies her to a ceilidh (or traditional Scottish social gathering, pronounced KAY-lee) celebrating the sixtieth wedding anniversary of the parents of his friend John Campbell (Powell regular John Laurie, who is credited as an advisor on the ceilidh sequence), where Joan is introduced to the music and dancing of the isles.

As anxious as Joan is to get to Kiloran, she finds that two things now stand in the way of the comfortable future she has plotted for herself so deliberately. One is practical: the fog which at first wouldn't lift has been followed by a gale that makes it too dangerous to be out on the water. The other is emotional: she finds herself unwillingly attracted to the unpretentious and quietly noble Tarquin, and the attraction is clearly mutual. At first just anxious to get to Kiloran and Sir Robert, she now becomes frantic to get there before her emotions can derail her carefully laid plans for the future.

Finally, in desperation Joan offers a large sum of money to a young boatman to take her to Kiloran during a lull in the storm and Torquil, recognizing the danger of such a foolish act, especially given the treacherous nature of the notorious local whirlpool called the Corryvreckan, insists on accompanying her. During the voyage the worst happens. A gale blows up, the boat's engine stalls, and the three foolhardy sailors must fight for their lives to avoid being drowned in the Corryvreckan, providing the narrative rationale for the thrilling set piece that forms the climactic sequence of the film.

It's a big, technically intricate sequence composed of location shots of the actual Corryvreckan (including some filmed by Powell himself with his handheld camera while strapped to the mast of a boat), shots of the actors filmed in the studio tank at Denham near London using the same small open boat as in the location shots, miniatures and models of the boat and its passengers, and most impressive of all, a Corryvreckan created for the film in the tank at Denham. This mock Corryvreckan, inspired by Cecil B. DeMille's parting of the Red Sea in the silent version of The Ten Commandments, uses gelatin rather than water, a specially built machine to create a realistic whirlpool in the studio tank, and a high-speed camera running backwards so that the whirlpool appears to be rising from the sea when the footage is projected normally. Aside from the sometimes obvious rear projection in the studio shots, the blend of the real and the simulated is nearly seamless. On both the technical and the emotional level, the entire sequence is just stunning.

The Corryvreckan sequence, while the part of the film that most obviously shows Powell's amazing technical skill, is not the only thing in I Know Where I'm Going! that does this, which is why I called the film seemingly simple. Powell originally wanted James Mason to play Torquil, but when Mason was reluctant to go on location to Scotland, he began to look elsewhere. He had known Roger Livesey since the mid-1930s, when he tested him for the lead in one of his quota-quickies, and the two later had a great success with Livesey playing the title role in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). Now Livesey wanted to play Torquil and embarked on a campaign to convince Powell, who thought that at thirty-eight Livesey was too old for the part, to cast him. He lost weight, dyed his hair blond, and worked on modifying his body language to suggest that of a man ten years younger. It worked and he got the role.

The only hitch was that Livesey was committed to a play in London and wouldn't be able to go to Scotland when the location shooting was scheduled. By now convinced that Livesey was indeed right for Torquil, Powell promised him he could get around this. Using a specially selected and coached double for the location shots, he cleverly combined long shots of the double with closer shots of Livesey filmed at Denham and carefully manipulated staging, editing, and optical effects to conceal the fact that, as Powell writes in his autobiography, Livesey "never came within five hundred miles of the Western Isles." If you don't already know this before you see the film, it's unlikely you will be aware of it. Powell later wrote that "so perfect was the illusion that I couldn't tell myself, now, which is Roger and which is his double."

Yet for all Powell's technical skill at creating cinematic illusion, what makes his films so memorable is that no matter how much trickery he used to produce those unforgettable images, he never lost sight of the importance of building the film on the human element—a compelling story and authentic character relationships and emotions. None of his films illustrates this better than I Know Where I'm Going! All the people in the film seem fully defined and individualized, right down to the unforgettable supporting characters like Catriona, Col. Barnstaple, John Campbell, Rebecca Crozier the grande dame of Mull, and characters who appear in only one or two scenes. At the center of the film, of course, are Torquil and Joan—Torquil the completely unaffected man and Joan the self-willed young woman on her way to marriage and a new life who is so taken by his steadfastness and openness that for the first time ever she begins to doubt that she does know where she's going.

As Torquil and Joan, Roger Livesey and Wendy Hiller play off each other beautifully. Livesey locates the calm center of Torquil and never strays from it. That constancy is the essential personal quality of Torquil, but it means that he is basically a static character. Hiller has the more challenging role. She has to establish an apparently fixed character then show how that person gradually undergoes an involuntary process of self-discovery. Joan is a woman whose outer rigidity acts to tamp down an inner emotional volatility that becomes agitated by her reactions to the people and places she encounters on her way to Kiloran. She finds an unfamiliar culture with customs and values that might have come from a previous century and falls in love with both a man and a way of life. Under the influence of Torquil and Scotland, this woman who has lived her entire life wrapped up in herself is unexpectedly taken out of herself, and the experience transforms her. Wendy Hiller shows subtly but unmistakably the conflict Joan feels as, against her will, she finds her own nature changing. Hiller rarely made movies, preferring to work on the stage, but her performance in I Know Where I'm Going! is simply one of the most memorable by an actress in British cinema.

I Know Where I'm Going! is perhaps Michael Powell's most personal film, for it expresses more strongly than any other his love of the sea and especially his love of Scotland. As with all of Powell and Pressburger's films, this one is a collaborative effort between the two, and I certainly don't wish to minimize the contribution of Pressburger. Yet the thing that gives the film its essential flavor, the Scottish element, was the product of Michael Powell. In his autobiography Powell describes how in I Know Where I'm Going! Pressburger devised the basic events of the plot and then he (Powell) fleshed them out:

This is the way Emeric and I always worked. He invented a situation and I followed it through to the end. Authors think of a storm, wind and waves and a stormy sea. A director personalizes the conflict. . . . According to our usual plan of work, my job was to add to and change the location sequences, bringing in all I had learned of authentic dialogue, atmosphere and names of the Western Isles.

With Torquil and Joan, Michael Powell's Scotland is really the third main character in the film. Powell invites us to discover along with Joan the color and customs of a place he depicts as magical, a place that has the power to bewitch, to alter the most ingrained attitudes, and to move those who encounter it in wholly unanticipated but serendipitous directions.

You might also like:

• Two Early Thrillers by Michael Powell, Part 1: The Spy in Black (1939)
• Two Early Thrillers by Michael Powell, Part 2: Contraband (1940)
• Two by Michael Powell: The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
• A Small Dark Masterwork: The Small Back Room (1949)
  

This post is part of A Tribute to the Archers: A Powell & Pressburger Movie Blogathon. For more posts on the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, visit the Classic Film and TV Cafe. Michael Powell's autobiography is A Life in Movies (New York: Knopf, 1987).

0 Brief Reviews

THE SET-UP (1949) ***½
The Set-Up recounts one crucial night in the life of a boxer, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan). Although the film is steeped in the milieu of the world of professional boxing, that milieu is so deglamorized and so filtered through the film noir look and sensibility that the movie transcends the boxing genre to become one of the key examples of the noir genre of the late 1940's. At 72 minutes, The Set-Up is lean and concentrated. Every detail is selected by director Robert Wise and cinematographer Milton Krasner to create a focused noir ambiance. The film's harshly lit nocturnal underworld is bounded by the dilapidated Paradise City Arena (boxing Wednesdays, wrestling Fridays), the shabby Cozy Hotel where Thompson is staying, a tawdry penny arcade called The Fun Palace, and a seedy night club called Dreamland whose garish dance music can be heard every time the action moves outside or a door or window is opened.

Everyone in the movie is sleazy—the lowlife hustlers huddled in doorways or loitering on the sidewalks, the jaded, corrupt men who work at the arena, the vicious smalltime hoodlum who fixes fights, and especially the grotesques in the audience screaming for blood and mayhem. The boxers are portrayed as pathetic losers who start out as frightened kids and end up as punch-drunk burnouts. Somewhere near the end of this career arc is Stoker Thompson, who after twenty years in the ring is at the age of 35 considered over the hill. The one thing that keeps him going is the illusory belief that he is always just "one shot away" from a really important match that will make his dreams reality.

The climactic bout between Thompson and a much younger boxer that caps the movie—brilliantly staged, photographed by multiple cameras, and edited to emphasize its brutality and arduous physicality—was clearly an influence on Scorsese's Raging Bull. Robert Ryan, in one of his rare starring roles, is uncharacteristically sympathetic, a dreamer who refuses to admit that any chance of success faded long ago, a man who no matter how badly beaten always struggles back to keep on fighting. As he says, "If you're a fighter, you gotta fight." And he keeps right on fighting until the end of the movie, when the relentlessly bleak world he inhabits finally breaks and then discards him.

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933) ****
In the early 1930's Warner Bros. produced a series of musicals that established their own unique style, a down-to-earth working-class view of show business in keeping with the gritty movies the studio produced in other genres. The typical Warners musical features a story about the practical and financial problems of mounting an elaborate revue-like stage production. The musical highlights are the outlandish and often surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley set to the songs of Al Dubin and Harry Warren as performed by Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Ginger Rogers.

The archetypal Warners musical is often considered to be 42nd Street (1933). But after seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 again recently, I would have to say that it is the better movie. The plot is constructed in such a way that rather than jamming all the production numbers into the last part of the movie as in 42nd Street and the similar Footlight Parade (1933), they are distributed throughout the movie, which opens with "We're in the Money" and concludes with "Forgotten Man," the latter perhaps the apotheosis of all Berkeley's production numbers. This results in a better balance, and more appealing mix, of music and plot. The plot itself adds new elements to the familiar "let's put on a show" story of other Warners musicals. It follows three showgirls as they pursue fame and romance—the innocent Polly (Ruby Keeler), the voluptuous and intelligent Carol (Joan Blondell), and the zany Trixie (a very funny Aline MacMahon, in a role reminiscent of Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like It Hot). When these showgirls tangle with the members of a snobbish Boston family (Dick Powell, Warren William, and Guy Kibbee), it allows for the kind of pointed interaction between the working class and the privileged rich more typical of a Capra comedy.

The Great Depression is an integral part of the movie, both onstage and off, providing a more topical context than the standard Hollywood musical. And while other 1930's musicals are often suggestive, this one—made the year before the Production Code began to be enforced in earnest—is at times downright bawdy. Gold Diggers of 1933 has enough serious elements and enough depth of characterization to give it greater substance than one might expect, but it never forgets that it is primarily an entertainment, and a very lively and thoroughly enjoyable one. Also worth noting are the fluid camerawork of Warners house cinematographer Sol Polito and the eye-catching Art Deco sets of Anton Grot.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955) **½
In the 1950's the director Otto Preminger seemed deliberately to seek projects that challenged the Production Code. In The Moon Is Blue (1954) the offending subject was sex. In the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), an allegation of rape—a crime not supposed to be mentioned by name—played a large part. Advise and Consent (1962) was one of the first mainstream American movies to deal openly with homosexuality. In between these movies, Preminger tackled the taboo subject of heroin addiction in this film, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Because of the film's notoriety and its source material, I anticipated a work of harsh realism and ground-breaking maturity. What I found instead was a subject daring for its time framed in strictly conventional Hollywood terms. The whole movie is filmed on a studio set that represents a city block of a down-and-out Chicago neighborhood. But as impressive as this set is, its resemblance to the real thing is superficial, its squalor relegated to a few suggestive touches.

Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, who has just returned from a jail term and treatment for heroin addiction at the federal facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Faced with the stress of a neurotically possessive paraplegic wife (Eleanor Parker) who is obsessively jealous of a pretty downstairs neighbor (Kim Novak) and whom he doesn't love, and with constant inducements to return to his criminal cronies and resume his use of heroin, he must use all of his willpower to resist falling back into his former life. The casting of Arnold Stang as his best friend, Leonid Kinskey as a quack doctor, Robert Strauss as a petty hoodlum, and Darren McGavin as a heroin dealer makes the atmosphere closer to Damon Runyon than Nelson Algren. The details of his life seem a Hollywood version of sleaze, more imagined than observed. The restrained Novak is surprisingly good, while Parker gives a florid, old-style performance that seems anomalous given the modern subject matter. The melodramatic contrivances of the plot also seem curiously old-fashioned.

One definite plus is the cinematography of Sam Leavitt, whose camera glides elegantly around the set during Preminger's customary long, unedited takes, although in a sense that elegance seems incongruous with the grim nature of the story. Another plus is Elmer Bernstein's hard, brassy jazz score, although its jagged tone unintentionally emphasizes the flaccidity of other elements of the movie. The biggest plus is Frank Sinatra's earnest performance (which deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination), in which he convincingly portrays Frankie's desperation to be strong while battling his own inner weaknesses and external temptations. That performance alone makes the movie worth seeing, but aside from that, don't expect anything remotely resembling realism. This is a purely Hollywood approach to a social milieu the movie clearly doesn't have much understanding of.

PYGMALION (1938) ****
Anyone familiar with My Fair Lady (1964) should take a look at this film version of the play by George Bernard Shaw on which the later musical is based. It is an even better movie. The plot is essentially the same, as is much of the best dialogue—no great surprise, since the adaptation is by Shaw himself. Without interruptions for songs and with its brisker pacing, the wit of the dialogue and the social commentary of the plot are even more pronounced.

Leslie Howard, who co-directed the movie with Anthony Asquith, is splendid as Prof. Henry Higgins, not so effete as Rex Harrison but still a self-centered academic insensitive to the feelings of others. Howard, a trained stage actor, gave many fine dramatic movie performances (The Animal Kingdom, Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Petrified Forest, Intermezzo), but I've never seen a better one by him than his comic turn in Pygmalion. As Eliza Dolittle, Wendy Hiller, also a trained stage actress, demonstrates amazing range in an even more demanding role.

As Higgins attempts to transform Eliza from a coarse Cockney flower seller into the simulacrum of a lady, Hiller must show Eliza's innate intelligence and a growing awareness of the artificial nature of class distinction. In the scene where Eliza has tea with the mother of Prof. Higgins, Hiller, playing the scene absolutely deadpan, is riotously funny. When she tells off Higgins for his coldness and lack of response to her feelings, she does so with a fiery spirit reminiscent of the young Katharine Hepburn. And at the end she must show that the experience of a new lifestyle has so altered Eliza that she is riven with confusion and anxiety at no longer having any real identity. All this Hiller does wonderfully in a subtly nuanced performance that is the center of the movie. She expresses all the phases of her character's transformation without ever losing the continuity of the character, convincing us that all of this playing about with social identity and self-presentation is happening to a real person. It is simply an astounding piece of acting. Even if you are thoroughly familiar with My Fair Lady, Pygmalion—with its brilliant balance of entertainment and social satire—is a film not to be missed.