I love it that this page is as full as a cornucopia with praise from fans of "I Know Where I'm Going."
In the same way that it is delightful for a movie fan to discover this little-known, black-and-white, Powell and Pressburger romance, it is also delightful to encounter other fans of the movie here.
"I Know Where I'm Going" is a quiet and adorable movie. It gives you a Scotland that really exists; if you aren't lucky enough to visit someday, you can visit by slipping into your jammies, brewing up some tea, putting out all the lights, and watching this movie.
Star Wendy Hiller was memorable, when she was younger, for her Eliza Doolittle, opposite Leslie Howard's Henry Higgins. When she was a bit older, she played Paul Scofield's / St. Thomas More's wife in "A Man for All Seasons."
Here Hiller plays Joan, a driven golddigger who is given pause for thought by a less-than-wealthy but highly noble Scottish Laird, Roger Livesy, whom she can't escape from when a gale postpones her marriage, which was scheduled to occur on an isolated island.
Joan's groom was to be a nouveau riche industrialist, who is renting the island, and who happens to be old enough to be her father. As Joan's scandalized father himself points out.
The DVD notes tell you what this movie had to say about war-time Britain, about Winston Churchill's being kicked out of office, about rationing and the loss of empire.
But ... enough of all that. This is a love story, the love story of the characters on the screen, and the love of its fans for this movie. Watching "I Know Where I'm Going" induces an atmosphere of coziness, tradition, mystery, tartan wool and fierce storms, of both the meteorological *and* cardiac varieties.
Enjoy the love story, the Scottish burrs, the rafter folklore, the golden eagle, the lead couple's first kiss, the wolfhounds silhouetted against the mist.
My only regret is that this film is so short ... I wish I could recommend another film as a double feature to fill in the afterglow this film induces... but what? "Brigadoon," a Hollywood musical about a mystical Scottish village, is too heavy-handed in comparison. Disney's "Thomasina" is sweet, but maybe too sweet.
Let's face it ... they don't make enough movies like "I Know Where I'm Going." Sweet but dry as scotch; scratchy as thistle. Mystical as an ancestral curse but clear-eyed as the first clear day after a storm breaks. How many romantic comedies ask you if you know how to skin a rabbit, and then show you a golden eagle eating one, quite graphically, on camera?
Sigh. All I can say is, I envy those who haven't seen this movie yet. You have a real pleasure ahead of you.
