I Know Where I’m Going!: In the Wind

Hillier was a master of chiaroscuro who loved shooting into the light and throwing shadows or luminous reflections against walls and ceilings. On Mull, he would hold up the production while he waited for the right cloud formations to appear, but his obsession was well justified by the results. The turbulent cloudscapes and fickle, vaporous light are not merely pretty backdrops, since weather is a driving force in the narrative and essential to the film’s atmosphere. Everything on the island is constantly in motion, an effect that Pressburger specifically wanted: grass rippling in waves, surf crashing over piers, trees lashing in gales, waterfalls tumbling down hillsides. Wind and sea bar Joan’s journey and snatch her itinerary, her wedding dress, her dignity. They represent all that she futilely fights against, and secretly desires.

Voices, stories, and songs are no less elemental to the place. “The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs,” as Caliban says of Prospero’s island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—a play Powell later devoted intense though ultimately fruitless efforts to filming. IKWIG is crowded with voices that battle for Joan’s heart and mind, starting with the stentorian narrator of the witty credit sequence, a newsreel parody that summarizes her life and character. There is the muffled, deferential voice that reads out the itinerary of her meticulously arranged journey from London to Kiloran, and the rhythmic, choral recitatives of her dream on the train.

As soon as Joan is over the border, accents change from English to Scottish, and the Gaelic she overhears at Port Erraig is as alien to her as the seals “singing” in the foggy harbor. Yet just the next day, when she hears Bellinger over the wireless, his stuffy drawl already sounds so strange to her that she asks if he has a cold. Beside the islanders’ lilting, lively speech, the nasal chatter of the English Robinson family—Bellinger’s rich, bridge-playing friends—is as repellent as the whine of mosquitoes.

As for Roger Livesey, whom we first hear when Torquil speaks to Joan as she waits on the deserted dock: if ever there were a voice you would want to hear in a cold, strange place, it would be this one. It warms you to your toes, like smoky Scotch whisky. Powell’s first attempt to cast Livesey, in The Phantom Light (1935), was nixed by producer Michael Balcon because he did not like the actor’s husky voice, and Powell vowed that someday he would make that unique instrument beloved. Livesey was indispensable to this period of the Archers’ work; in the very different roles that he played in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), IKWIG, and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), he sturdily embodies the values they championed: kindness, honesty, unselfishness, love of home and community.

Torquil MacNeil, the laird of Kiloran, is “Kiloran”: it’s how the locals all address him. This conflation of place and person adds a clever bit of wordplay to the script: Joan is equally desperate to get to the island and to escape from the man, but in the end, she winds up just as she planned, as the mistress of Kiloran—both island and man. Her heart’s desire is also her spirit’s home.

This play with names also underscores the way the islanders are stitched into their landscape by language and stories. Powell wrote that in his films “images are everything,” and he embraced the idea of the “composed film,” with wordless sequences precisely choreographed to music. Yet the Archers’ work is also full of scenes that tell rather than show: long speeches, lectures, conversations over radio or telephone. In IKWIG, Rebecca Crozier (Nancy Price) paints a word picture of the highland gathering at Oban, savoring details of color, costume, blazing jewels, and the sparkling harbor. Joan listens, spellbound, her gaze helplessly swerving to Torquil as her hostess describes the splendor of the highland men. My mother, whose favorite movie is IKWIG, attests to the power of this scene: after her first viewing, she had a firm but false memory that the highland gathering appeared on-screen.

Rebecca’s words are underscored by low, skirling bagpipes: at first you think they are imagined or remembered, but actually they are a sound bridge into the next scene, the Campbells’ ceilidh—a party with music and dancing, marking the wedding anniversary of Rebecca’s gardener. The whole film is carried along by music, from big-band swing in the opening nightclub scene, to a snatch of “Loch Lomond” heard in Joan’s dream on the train, to the folk song that gives the film its title (suggested by Powell’s then-wife, Frankie), all interwoven with Allan Gray’s stirring, richly melodic score. But the ceilidh, arranged by John Laurie (another Archers stalwart, who also plays John Campbell), is a tour de force, opening with a shot of the wooden floor bouncing under the dancers’ feet. The music shifts from a rousing schottische, to a clan march, to an aching lament for a solo voice, to the Gaelic love song “The Nut-Brown Maiden,” which becomes Joan and Torquil’s love theme: sung, translated, and finally played by a trio of pipers.

The ceilidh marks a turning point in their relationship, with Joan fittingly perched precariously halfway up a ladder. They watch an old couple celebrating sixty years of marriage and a young couple—Kenny and Bridie, who are about to become important characters—quarreling and making up. As with the famous duel scene in Colonel Blimp, there is a big buildup to Joan and Torquil dancing together, only for the dance itself to be elided, with a cut to them hurrying away afterward. Her panicked flight tells us all we need to know about how deeply the experience has affected her.

For all their bravura and maximalism, Powell and Pressburger understood the power of leaving things out, building into their films chasms that the mind must leap, gaps that the imagination must fill. Like Joan Webster, we discover that we don’t want things to be made too easy. We want to catch our own fish rather than have them delivered, to swim in the ocean rather than in a pool.

The two legends woven into the film, the curse on Moy Castle and the tale of the whirlpool Corryvreckan, are both cleverly parceled out to build suspense, and to suggest the way Joan shuts her ears and her heart to the truth until it is almost too late. She first hears about the curse when she arrives, and learns the details during an offscreen visit to the castle, but we don’t get the full story until the final scene—in the remembered voice of Torquil’s nanny, another disembodied speaker. The tale of Prince Breacan’s battle with the whirlpool, begun in the Tobermory coast-guard post, is interrupted just before the end, which we don’t learn until Torquil and Joan are almost in Corryvreckan themselves.

These old tales bring in gruesome notes of torture and death, which echo through the everyday lives of Mull’s inhabitants. Catriona with her hounds looks like a wild goddess of the hunt; and even Colonel Barnstaple (C. W. R. Knight), for all his comical eccentricity, reminds us with his falcons and his eagle that this is a world of blood and danger. Joan, the sheltered Londoner who “only know[s] the wrong way” to skin a rabbit, must learn to respect the power of nature. Like the wind and the tides, the magnetic attraction between her and Torquil is irresistible, a force that becomes nearly visible on-screen. It is abundantly clear to the knowing but enigmatic Catriona, née MacLaine, whose witchlike allure is heightened by her sharing the name of her ancestress, the author of the curse on Moy Castle.

Few heroines of love stories have ever behaved more unattractively than Joan does when she bribes Kenny to take her to Kiloran. Wendy Hiller—a distinguished stage actress, a favorite of George Bernard Shaw, and the originator of several of his heroines on stage and film—bravely allows us to see Joan at her very worst: blinkered, selfish, and imperiously strident. The first time I saw IKWIG, I had a hard time forgiving her, but I have come to cherish the fact that such a flawed woman wins the love of a practically perfect man. It is more often the privilege of erring men to be redeemed by love.

The moral of her story is more complex than “money isn’t everything.” Joan’s confusion stems from the fact that she is stubbornly determined to be the mistress of her destiny. It is not just the dream of being rich that she’s afraid to lose, but the illusion of control; she cannot bring herself to submit. Yet it is clear that if she marries Bellinger, she will sacrifice her independence and become stifled by social niceties, with “everything arranged for her,” while by surrendering to love she will become her authentic self. This is the eternal promise of romantic comedy. Her carefree, arm-swinging march up the road behind the pipers—carrying through the forward momentum from the film’s opening moments, when we saw her as a crawling infant and a sprinting schoolgirl—shows that Joan is liberated, even as Torquil is enslaved.

What other filmmakers would be bold—or cheeky—enough to crown a happy ending with the words “and he shall die in his chains”? Those of us who love this film know that we will never escape its hold. ’Tis a terrible strong curse.