I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 379, 27 September 1946, Page 32

I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING

(G-B-D)

‘THE trouble with this film is that, .like its heroine, it doesn’t really. Know where it’s going, I mean. It set off. one mav

assume, to be a story on the theme that having no money is not at all the same thing as poverty, and by following that line it could have been a pretty good story; but it gets bogged down somewhere between a simple woman-meets-man romance and a travelogue about Scotland, after a brief deviation into the realm of the supernatural in order to investigate a family curse. Though the ending is pure hokum, to describe the romance as being of the novelettish boy-meets-girl type would not be fair, and you will notice that I haven’t done so, For it’ is one of the film’s greatest advantages that both Wendy Hiller (ex-Pygmalion and Major Barbara) and Roger Livesay (the ci-devant Colonel Blimp) behave much more in the manner of normal, natural people than one expects of screen characters in such circumstances as are encountered here, She is a self-assured young English woman who has gone to the Western Isles of Scotland in order to marry, for

his money, a big business man who has rented the Isle of Kiloran from its impoverished owner. On the last lap of her journey the weather turns masty: she cannot cross to the island immediately and so meets, arid sees a lot of, the real Laird of Kiloran (Livesay), who is on leave from the Navy. For seven days she waits on the mainland for the weather to clear, while the storm blows away her determination to marry for money and the company of the Laird inclines her more and more to marry for love. That is just about all there is to it, so far as plot goes, except for one exciting sequence when the heroine, in a last desperate effort to make her head instead of her heart take her where she is going, embarks for a trip on murderous seas and barely misses being engulfed in a whirlpool. The rest of the seven days are spent in much less adventurous fashion, being mostly devoted to sight-seeing around the mainland. There is certainly plenty to see; and the makers of the film, Powell and Pressburger, have not stinted the local colour. They have, in fact, been over-generous. On this conducted tour of the Highlands we visit several stately castles and humbler but no less picturesque habitations; we look in on a ceilidh to watch

the dancing and listen to the piping; we go out on the moors; we learn a lot, about the legends of the district; and of course we hear a good deal of Gaelic and meet many of the local inhabitants, one or two of whom are distinctly fey. Much of this atmosphere is good, and the scenery is always magnificent, but there are some extraneous details-in-cluding, I think, the old fellow with the golden eagle and that business about tie family curse. You might almost expect at the end to hear the Voice of Fitzpatrick bidding a syrupy farewell to the Western Isles, so strong does the travelogue flavour become. Yet in spite of its gauche montients, and its lack of a clear sense of direction 1 Know Where I’m Going is, on balance, an agreeable picture.