I Know Where I'm Going! (cant forget the exclamation point) is kind of an adventure story, but it's one that only involves movement from one place to another and bouts of action and suspense in bursts - in this case where Wendy Hiller is going from her one spot in merry ol' England by trains and other means to get to a small seaside village so she can sail to another isle (Kiloran), and then, as the main beat of action in the second half, where she risks it and goes by tiny motor boat with two other men in the midst of a "gale" (one, Roger Livesly, warned her as much as possible not to) - while the adventure part really is, to get corny for a moment, about something else.
See, the film opens with narration telling us about how Joan Webster starts as a baby, then on through the ages of 5, 12 and 18 into knowing what she wants (early on it's silk stockings, uh, naturally I guess) and how she will get it some day or another. And so with the man that she meets and is betrothed to (via whatever the 1940s British way was of Internet Dating), she knows she wants that too. But the adventure here is that she has to put herself into a situation of the unknown, and in this scenario it's the seaside town and it's citizens, who are friendly but have an edge to them that Joan can't seem to connect with... But then there's that Torquil MacNeil, who has some lineage going back aways, was a naval officer and is now back from the war, and may be ready to settle down. And now his life story intersects, however unlikely, with her decent but stubborn self.
This has the makings for some tricky stuff to pull off for Powell and Pressburger; how to make it more than what one might expect from romantic comedy (though for them comedy is a much more dry and subtle term, based on quirks of characters and, early on on the train as she sleeps and has a wild dream of her fantasy life come to pass, through visual flamboyance), where, yes, the stuck up city woman is wooed by the down to earth rural chap? The solution is realism, and they take the location so seriously that it becomes itself another character, and the people who populate much of the cast (particularly like those at the big party in the middle interlude) were locals who didn't have to fake authenticity, they simply were those people of the Scottish Hebrides who dance to bagpipe music and sometimes sing a tune or too, maybe a sad one but also happy ones, and so there's an underlying anthropology to this that grounds the more conventional (or potentially conventional) story beats.
It is a big help as well Hiller and Livesly are wonderful on screen together, and though it isn't necessarily apparent what will happen for them over the course of the film there's a spark that one senses right away. They each have their own arcs to go through - his has an element of the Scottish heritage he has to reckon with, down to a scene late in the film where he is in one of the old castles and hears a voice with an old tale about the MacNeils and so on - and they have real conflicts they need to work out. Im not sure if one or two scenes fully work with the supporting cast, like the older man who loves to hunt and expounds LOUDLY about his hawk, or the woman who gets angry at Joan (maybe its the writing more than the actress in that one scene), but those are minor points to gripe about. What works here is the core of this man and woman, they're decent people with rich interior lives, and the actors convey that.
Couple that with how expressive and moving the shots are here, with black and white at times given a documentary look but then another deeper, more mysterious look to it. I wouldn't call the lighting noir, but there are times when the characters are framed and lit to look like they're something out of a dream, and that is something special too. Even on a "minor" work, supposedly one P&P made when they couldn't get color stock in the end times of the war, they could create an affecting piece of work that is meant to spark the spirit as much as the heartstrings (and that whirlpool sequence has some
