55. I Know Where I’m Going

Emeric Pressburger, of the British filmmaking team, along with Michael Powell, known as the Archers, has been quoted as emphasizing that a film should have “a little bit of magic…” Though their team name implies precision, straight to the point, shooting, there was from out of their shooting range (so long ago) one memorable treatment of the seemingly crystal clear subject of romance, namely, I Know Where I’m Going (1945), that can, I’m sure, validly lay claim to conjuring real magic.

From that vantage point you certainly wouldn’t imagine this Joan being subjected to torture (the wheel, or anything else). She is very much the smart young (25, actually) modern girl who wants it all and is sure she knows what does the trick. The wartime cooperative priority seems never to have touched her; and she raps the typically cautious banker (“You’re not Lady Bellinger yet!”) with her seemingly solid portfolio—“We’ll live on an island, far away from…people!” (Where has that anti-social attack come from?) Daddy points out what appears to be a downside (“He must be nearly as old as I am…”); and she’s immediately about dancing and strong spirits. Her wealthy fiancé’s army of hunters makes sure she comes through to the portal of the Blitz-free Hebrides hideaway; but that’s as far as the corporate flash gets. The weather is, as usual, an organic Blitz and she’s pinned down on an island within sight of her destination—so near, and yet so far. This zone of oscillation (the Isle of Mull—a place to mull things over?) should, in one sense, be right up her alley—it being the precinct of a quirky, hunting-crazed resident (an old World War I veteran, as intent as she on letting a passion for easy fixes eclipse the War at hand). In his case it’s raising falcons, and, recently, an eagle, which he calls, “Torquil,” after the Laird (Lord) of Kiloren, the island Joan’s Sugar Daddy has rented for the duration.

The namesake, of this matter of being high on the food chain, is a naval officer on leave and also hoping to get across to Kiloren, to visit friends there, apparently far enough away from the haven to be essentially null and void. Joan, after stubbornly and stand-offishly refusing to countenance the alert concerning an obstacle to her wedding march, reported by that fellow voyager (as yet unknown to be the owner of the treasure island), drags herself away from her vigil at the dock and settles for staying overnight at the nearby home (recommended by a cordial Torquil) of Catriona, a woman about her age and who makes quite an entrance (virtually mythic in scope) with her hunting dogs (the eagle commander lives there, too). In a setting studded with variously assertive carnivores, Kiloren strikingly introduces something completely different—a lively interest in someone (several, in fact) other than himself. Though he tells the old man that he’s hoping to get in some shooting and fishing, his patter is all about eliciting wit in others, a round of gusto that leaves Joan, for the first time, in our view, somewhat confused, ill at ease. (Catriona asks her, “Can you skin a rabbit?” and she chases her out of the kitchen on finding she can’t.) “Taming a woman must be worse than taming an eagle,” Kiloren lobs in the direction of eagle-tamer. “Can’t be done,” is the latter’s easy shot. Catriona tries to rally a transparently disappointed Joan, “I haven’t heard any intelligent female nonsense for months…” But she can’t resist expressing an implicit challenge to the overdressed interloper. After dinner, from nearby bedroom windows, he gets a light for his cigarette from hers, and he tells her about a lucky wish (for good travelling weather). “I warn you, it doesn’t work if you don’t believe it…”

Next day, the fog and rain gone, now replaced by deadly winds, he jokes to her, “You wished too hard.” She doesn’t even smile. He not wanting to inconvenience Catriona any longer, Torquil suggests they wait it out at a hotel in a nearby village; and, while she asks, “Can we get a car?” he replies, “No need. You can get a bus.” He tells her, “Cheer up,” in such a way she has to admit, “Oh, I’m alright…” Walking together to the nearest bus stop, they pass the ruin of a castle. She does not as yet know who he is, and so the information (of which she was already apprised by the driver bringing her to Catriona’s dock) that the place has a curse attached, to the Lairds of Kiloren, does not immediately make much sense to her. “I’ll risk it,” she says (the city miss not to be interfered with by obsolete superstition). He reveals his identity and reconfirms his determination to follow in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and so on, as devoutly being ruled by that malice. (Thus the budding friendship takes on a sub-text of culture clash.) On the bus, he’s immediately joking and commiserating with a group of farmers armed with shotguns to kill the famous eagle, Torquil, for his preying on their lambs. The conversation turns to the alien at large on the Isle of Kiloren. “Like a little king, he is,” one complains. She’s troubled by that gossip more than she admits to herself, notwithstanding Kiloren’s pointing out the reasonableness of such extravagances as shipping in salmon prepared for eating when the waters all around teem with them. And when, at the hotel, she contacts her special man and hears him priggishly refer to a couple of blue-bloods she could look up, as “the only people worthwhile knowing around here…” her face and body seem numbed, as if a subtext of terrible news had come across the airwaves.

Right from this point—and a subsequent clearing the air about the untouchables (he telling her, “They’re not poor. They just haven’t got any money;” she insisting, “That’s the same thing” [as being poor]; and he, somehow incisively cogent in saying, “Oh, no. Something quite different…”)—she realizes that the young aristocrat (reaching us as a young and surprisingly intelligent Prince Charles [in fact the superb actor, Roger Livesey] is a far better choice than the man she’s about to marry. (This despite Joan’s having shown a quite ruthless tenacity about shoring up her dreamboat, rushing to ridicule Torquil’s disinclination to test the superstition about the ruin, on the heels of discovering that her new companion is a far more formidable landowner than her prospective host. “Are you afraid?” she purrs. But here we have to ask ourself, Is she merely shoring up a less than sublimely solvent sponsor, or is she rather crudely sticking with assets of modernity at this point far more impressive to her than traditional claims?)

As the stubborn weather digs in, Joan wages a troubled and troubling devotion to nouveau powers (human and primal), all the while being drawn into a venerable whirlpool of decencies and charms she has waged war against since her childhood, as consolidated in the full thrust of adult independence. “Do you mind if we sit at separate tables?” she moots; and, hearing him rightly tease her, “I think you are the most proper lady,” she finds herself being a proper ass the likes of which she would never have imagined herself sinking to. (And yet she has to declare—beating herself up even worse—“I take that as a compliment.”) She does eventually look up “the only people worth knowing”—avid for bridge and bridge alone; and with an icy, self-serving young daughter (just as Joan was). This smart set moves on to the home of an elderly dowager to whom Torquil is paying a visit; and, while he sets the table for lunch (acceding to Joan’s cues not to let on they’ve met), the old lady enthuses about the unfailing gusto sure to be had at an imminent gala (a Kaylee), on the occasion of the sixtieth wedding anniversary of the foremost members of the Campbell family. “The place blazes with jewels. The men are even more splendid than the women. And we dance; we dance all night, till the sun shines through the curtains!” Torquil, like Joan at the hotbed of bridge, earlier in the day, begs off making a fourth (“Oh this new generation,” the bridge promoter laments, resignedly, having found that he’s certifiable gentry.)

So Joan and Torquil end up at the Kaylee, they dance all night (someone tells them, “You were the best dancers…”; someone else refers to them as, “…you and your lady…”); and the highlight comes when the old couple are raucously presented, a speech is called for, the man opens his mouth to try to cover the powers sustaining their life—and he can’t get out so much as a word, shaking his head and tottering off into the crowd. This, the film has come to frame, is the upsurge of an unadorned paradox leaving the two old celebrants a field of both joy and melancholy. Joan’s theme song, “I Know Where I’m Going” [with the coda, “I know who’s going with me/I know who I love/But the dear knows who I’ll marry...”] seems to place her at a point where she’d have no trouble blurting out coy coverage of her victory march up the aisle. But this is a romantic procession of a film that requires going beyond a melodramatic/domestic surface and realizing how it ever so quietly and subtly delivers the stuff to leave us speechless. She—the elements be damned—bribes a young ferry deckhand to take her to pay dirt on that outermost island (shrouded in chaotic forces of nature)—her aforementioned assets, 46 pounds sterling, derived from a manufacturing job; and her always anxious Daddy being astronomically remote from Torquil’s insouciance. Torquil attempts to have her recognize the death and grief her selfishness would surely effect. She tries to impress the deckhand’s fiancé that “I’m not safe here. I’m on the brink of losing everything I’ve always wanted!” The girl complains bitterly, “Some folks are who like to satisfy their passion!”—setting in relief the far from obvious passion Joan is all about. Unable to dissuade her (“Are you interested in anything but yourself?”), and hearing from an observant Catriona, “She’s running away from you!” Torquil joins the voyage, skilfully overcomes the storm and a whirlpool (a sort of local-legendary-redolent black hole, pertaining very well to Joan’s unspoken “passion”) insofar as he manages to navigate back to Catriona’s port… And what will the next day bring?

During the tempest, he had repaired the motor; and, before giving it a go, he had told her (now exhausted, embarrassed and minus her wedding dress, a victim of the gale), “Now, pray!” The motor comes to life, they skirt the whirlpool, and as they do, she calls out. With heartfelt smiles all round, “They know a good prayer when they hear one!” Tucked into bed by Catriona, who still swears by prayers to make the weather behave, Joan declares, “I’m not praying tonight.” And with this choice bit of screenwriting Powell (probably; but also Pressburger, looking for magic) covers our protagonist’s modern skepticism and understanding that where she’s going is into the midst of archaic, clannish attentions to the common good—attentions now powerfully cogent and compelling to her. The weather finally cooperates; Joan heads for the boat to bring to life her modernist dream; Torquil says, “Always the little lady doing the right thing; she replies, “I can’t change myself;” she also says, “Will you do something for me? I want you to kiss me…” They kiss; they part; Torquil, going by the curse zone, is now emboldened to cross the threshold and he hears with increased incisiveness the jist of the curse. A Catriona from long ago betrays a Laird of Kiloran, who hunts down her and her lover (at the castle) and has them perish by drowning (chained together) in the well (lost in a kind of ineluctable whirlpool). Before she dies, Catriona launches this curse—“If ever a Laird of Kiloran should cross this threshold, he should be chained forever to a woman.” The woman appears (with the three pipers meant for the Big House), they call to each other and we see them together from far, far away.

Wars, like curses, feuds and storms, do come to an end—only to morph into other deadly threats. So what’s a body to do? There’s not only safety but riches (of possibility) in numbers (prominently including extended families). But isn’t there a special ignition which only an individual crossing a threshold can bring about? The whirlpool of affections is, we learn from this sparkling, difficult and glorious film, a lot more than the stuff of brides, grooms, chains and smart fun, like bridge. The smart American dance band with which she was in her element, at the outset, may have materially been overtaken by the barking seals in the bay. But it won’t have disappeared altogether.

Let’s dip into its handsomely filmed black and white nuances of a Hebrides location and of London-studio-based interiors, to begin with one of the protagonists, Joan, and her War-era-styled ocelot-skin-patterned hat. There’s a war going on—most of the patrons of the first scene’s upscale restaurant are in uniform—but you’d never know it from Joan’s cracking the whip in the direction of her bank manager/father, to fork over her liquid assets on behalf of a sojourn to Scotland, where she’s scheduled to be married to the owner of Consolidated Chemical Industries (“Did you bring my money?”). As played by Wendy Hiller, an expert in transmitting peppy chain reactions, Joan goes on from letting her dad in on the happy event—rather late; and he’s not invited—to ordering drinks and demanding that he, the picture of Cromwellian asceticism, dance with her. “Come on, Daddy!” (He had, according to her [in a timid rebelliousness on being somehow touched by a rapidly and confusedly rebranding world], taught her to dance.) Her embodying an ebullient and stunning big cat (with a rich twinkle in her eyes and plush dimples) barely manages to say good-bye to her parent, who had accompanied her to a First Class compartment on the Scottish Night Train (“The Night Scotsman”), so absorbed does she become with “Hunter,” her fiancé’s rep in charge of travel plans. “I managed to prevent them from putting you over the wheel,” he reports (a useful lieutenant to her warrior Maid). We learn by a series of brief flashbacks that she had very early on acquired a taste for exceptional sensuous stimulation—as a 5-year-old she told Santa, by mail, “I want a pair of silk stockings, and I don’t mean artificial.” From that vantage point you certainly wouldn’t imagine this Joan being subjected to torture (the wheel, or anything else). She is very much the smart young (25, actually) modern girl who wants it all and is sure she knows what does the trick. The wartime cooperative priority seems never to have touched her; and she raps the typically cautious banker (“You’re not Lady Bellinger yet!”) with her seemingly solid portfolio—“We’ll live on an island, far away from…people!” (Where has that anti-social attack come from?) Daddy points out what appears to be a downside (“He must be nearly as old as I am…”); and she’s immediately about dancing and strong spirits. Her wealthy fiancé’s army of hunters makes sure she comes through to the portal of the Blitz-free Hebrides hideaway; but that’s as far as the corporate flash gets. The weather is, as usual, an organic Blitz and she’s pinned down on an island within sight of her destination—so near, and yet so far. This zone of oscillation (the Isle of Mull—a place to mull things over?) should, in one sense, be right up her alley—it being the precinct of a quirky, hunting-crazed resident (an old World War I veteran, as intent as she on letting a passion for easy fixes eclipse the War at hand). In his case it’s raising falcons, and, recently, an eagle, which he calls, “Torquil,” after the Laird (Lord) of Kiloren, the island Joan’s Sugar Daddy has rented for the duration.

Latest Images

Trending Articles

Latest Images