I Know Where I'm Going!

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going! opened in 1945 and entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound critics' poll in 2022, nearly eighty years after its release. It is among the warmest of their films, made between A Canterbury Tale (1944) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946); the three form the central trilogy of their wartime and immediate post-war work, and all three have kept rising in critical estimation.

Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller, in one of the defining roles of her career), a strong-willed young Englishwoman of unsentimental modern conviction, is determined to marry a wealthy industrialist who has rented an island in the Scottish Hebrides for the wedding. The Hebridean weather, a delayed ferry and a young Scottish naval officer named Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey) keep getting in her way, and the film follows the interruptions through a long, unplanned Highland stay. Pamela Brown plays the local laird's daughter Catriona, and Finlay Currie is a villager who befriends them.

Erwin Hillier photographed the Mull of Kintyre and the Outer Hebrides, largely on real Scottish coastal locations in the autumn of 1944, and the film has one of the most distinctive landscapes in British wartime cinema. The Corryvreckan whirlpool sequence is among the great set pieces of the Powell-Pressburger filmography. It is a romantic comedy and a record of the Highland landscape, and also a gently philosophical film about the gap between the life you have planned and the one in front of you.