“My wife worked with Michael Powell, and treasures this as her favorite movie. Although I am genuinely fond of the film, it did not make my first cut. Upon reflection, however, its inclusion seems prudent.”

Good move, Ricky. Before you get your head ripped off at home. This film inspires that sort of ferocious reaction in some. On the disc there is a feature regarding a woman, a writer from New York, who stumbled upon the film and was so deeply moved by it she took an extensive trip to the Western Isles of Scotland to visit it’s many shooting locations. She met Michael Powell at a screening in the late 80s, shortly before making her trip. She told him how the film had changed her life, and that she was going to Tobermory for three weeks just to see the place it was set. Powell, well in his dotage, told her that if she spent three weeks in Tobermory she would certainly have her life changed. The romance of the film, as much about the place as it is about the two leads, makes that seem a feasible notion.

There’s an awful lot to like and admire, and I’m sure I’ll get around to enumerating some quantity of those things, but let’s start with this: it’s a miracle of a screenplay. The triumph here is first and foremost writer Emeric Pressburger’s. Here’s the pitch – a young woman wants to get to an island, but cannot and cannot, and when she finally can, she doesn’t want to go anymore. It could not be simpler, more hermetically perfect, and it ought to make all the rest of the pitches running around Hollywood feel ashamed and childish, leading to dumbass trailers that start with narration like “In a world…” or “Robert DeNiro’s a cop with an edge…” – god, shoot yourself now. IKWIG (it’s known as IKWIG, isn’t that cute? It even shows up in the production credits that way at one point.) is a million miles from such nonsense, being a much finer and more valuable nonsense instead – a story deeply rooted in fable, in magic, in timeless truth.

Among the many threads Pressburger pulls together into an integral whole are not one but two myths (that of the whirlpool of Corryvreckan and those unbreakable hairs of faithful women, and Moy Castle with it’s curse on the Lairds of Kiloran), the almost-postwar economy and the urge to get on from the business of war to the business of life, country mice versus city mice, the fault lines of the marriage between Scotland and England, how the ghosts of old relationships haunt new ones, the illusion of control versus the humbling reality of chance, class differences – perhaps the inescapable subject of all english literature, and a symbolic golden eagle (credited real name: Mr. Trubshaw), half-wild, half trained, difficult to hold onto. More than enough. These elements somehow balance and inform each other to create delirious romance. All this the story has, and yet there’s no more plot than you could scribble on a napkin. Prospective writers, take note.

I’d like to concentrate on the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film, which introduces Joan Webster as played by Wendy Hiller and takes her on her journey from the big city to the edge of Scots waters, where she will teeter for the rest of the film, having her certainties tested.

So ends the formal beginning to the story. From here on a journey interrupted becomes a battle of wills between heart and head. There are literally dozens of additional little moments to appreciate, even in just this first section of the film – the credits themselves, so inventively rendered, the swishpan from the bartender to Joan, the way the restaurant Maitre’De magically appears at her table, as if on roller skates, the freighter ship Captain on the trip to Mull telling her it’s “a sublime day”, even as the clouds burst and seas roil. But let’s move on. I find I can’t stop this post without at least a few more caps from the rest of the film:

One of the production facts that’s hard to take on retrospect is that Roger Livesey never got within 500 miles of the location at Tobermory. He was working on the London stage simultaneous with the shoot. It’s pretty undetectable – he’s very effectively doubled, local locations are recreated in or near London, and the rear projection is higher quality than usual.

Lastly, according to Powell’s autobiography A Life in Movies, the film’s title comes from his wife Frankie, who connected the story up to an old folk song of the same title. This of course became the film’s theme as well. The money stanza:

I know where I’m going
And I know who’s goes with me
I know who I love
But the de’il knows who I’ll marry