Euphoria #34: IKWIG!
Apologies to a couple of people who’ve suggested clips for our ongoing Cinema Euphoria project but haven’t had them show up yet, but — have you noticed? — we have a bit of a theme going on this week.
Yes, it has turned into a week of Scottish Euphoria (two words that seldom go together). Starting with THE WICKER MAN and carrying on through GREGORY’S GIRL and A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH — not itself a Scottish film in any way, but an excuse for some anecdotes from assistant director Lawrie Knight, who was born and died here in Edinburgh. I’m not sure how I can shoehorn THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS into this theme, but with enough ingenuity anything should be possible.
So today we continue in a similar vein with a prize extract from I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING!, another film from the Powell-Pressburger team.
IKWIG, as we shall henceforth be calling it, takes place largely on a fictional version of the island of Mull, and still attracts tourists to that part of the world. Perhaps not quite as many as LOCAL HERO, but a few. (Curiously, both movies feature iconic public telephone boxes.) Here we find Wendy Hiller on her way to marry Consolidated Chemical Industries, before fate intervenes, proving that while we may THINK we know where we’re going, the forces of the universe are always capable of radically altering our plans.
The folk song that gives IKWIG its title, and which plays in this scene, may be strangely familiar even to non-aficionados of traditional song, especially if they are fans of Nicholas Ray. Ray’s debut feature, THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, uses the same theme in its opening titles, testament to the folk-music advice of Ray’s friend Woody Guthrie, who assisted, uncredited, with the selection of music.
Oh yes! The clip was suggested by filmmaker and writer Mary Gordon, who wrote:
I also love the bonkers dream scene from I know where i’m going when the train seems to travel amongst tartan-covered breasts – or am i just making that up? And just generally in that film having a female character who is frankly unlikeable and not scared to be unlikeable…
We then debated whether the tartan breasts were in fact breasts or just Lollobrigidian hills, and I put it to all of you that one of them has a tunnel in it, ergo it’s a HILL.
Agree about the heroine, she’s tough and cold and very very stubborn BUT there’s still something positive there. I think Powell and Pressburger were very skilled and imaginative about finding sympathy for even quite monstrous characters: I adore Wendy in this film, as I adore Lermontov and Sister Ruth and Mark Lewis in Powell’s PEEPING TOM. Maybe Wendy Hiller is appealing here because she breaks all the rules about how women are supposed to behave in romantic movies, and that makes her refreshing company. Screenwriters take note: movie characters are different from real people in that what they mainly should be is surprising and stimulating. I don’t generally choose real-life friends for their ability to give me conniptions, but I certainly don’t want to spend my movie-viewing time with a lot of placid, lovely people. I need brazen nutters!
IKWIG was our friend Lawrie’s favourite Powell and Pressburger film, even though he didn’t work on it. I think he liked its relative modesty, compared to the overheated, un-British intensity of BLACK NARCISSUS and THE RED SHOES. I think, also, that he managed to convince himself that those classics he worked on were really not so very great — and he maintained this illusion until any time he caught a glimpse of one, and then he would be blown away all over again by how undeniably staggeringly gorgeous they are.
February 1, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Oh the British can be very intense. Consider Performance or anything by Derek Jarman or Harold Pinter. Not to mention Alan Bennett. One could make virtual clip show: That’s Intensity!
Criterion has a lovely DVD of IKWIG which includes and interview with a fan so obsessed with the film that she travelled from America to retrace its heroine’s steps as best she could.
BTW, when she was here in L.A. for a screeening of Bluebeard’s Castle, Thelma Schoonmaker mentioned the fact that Pressburger was a “registered alien” during the war which greatly restricted his ability to travel. Consequently he was nowhere near the loaction shooting of IKWIG. He had to sign in and sign out with the authoriities each time he came to the studio. But of course he loved England, and Walbrook’s big speech in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is simply Emeric Pressburger speaking directly from his heart.
February 1, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Not only did Emeric never make it to Scotland, neither did Roger Livesey — he was busy with a play in London so he’s doubled in all the long shots, while the close-ups were all taken down south and cut in.
I don’t have the Criterion disc but I have the documentary, which was made by the lovely Mark Cousins, he of the slightly awkward Jeanne Moreau run-in mentioned earlier. The fan’s journey makes for a great thruline for the doc.
There’s a definite kind of British intensity which is very buttoned-down and focussed, to mix metaphors like mad. That’s what I see in Pinter. Powell uses understatement from his actors, but also gets OPERATIC and surreal (British surrealism is usually cold-and-quirky, Powell’s is practically LATIN) so he seems to bring something quite unique to our cinema. Jarman was knowingly in the Powell tradition — when he made The Tempest he said that Powell should really be directing it.
Thelma has made a few appearances at the Edinburgh Film Fest and is always a huge hit. Last time, Scorsese let her come even though he was shooting The Departed, because she was going to talk about Powell’s influence on Scorsese and he was very keen for people to hear about that.
February 1, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Well the buttons in Pinter proceed from the fact that he was a Jewish tailor’s son, and not expected to be anything toehr than a Jewish tailor. But he became an actor, learned how to speak like the upper classes better than most of them did themselves, and therby discovered the nature of power and the means to use it.
“He’s a slum boy, you know. I happened to be in a slum one day and — there he was.”
February 1, 2008 at 6:29 pm
I caught IKWIG on TV about a year ago. Not only was it striking how bold and uninhibited the heroine is but I noticed how many decent female roles of varying ages there are in it. Again, they are allowed to be sly and calculating and not all that flattering to each other. Interesting that Roger Livesey was not on location – of course the play is more important! I need to watch this back now.
February 1, 2008 at 6:37 pm
J:
Powell developed a theory that the way to present a double is not cautiously, like the dentist creeping about behind his cape in Plan 9 From Outer Space, but BOLDLY, having him stride right up to the camera, full-face. That way the audience never suspects you’re trying to pull a fast one.
IKWIG gives the best role ever to Pamela Brown, who was Powell’s lover. He had quite unconventional, but excellent taste in women. James Mason thought Powell’s taste very different from his own, so was very careful to be involved in the casting of Miranda for their proposed Tempest film. Mason liked the final choice so much he married her.
February 1, 2008 at 6:49 pm
I love Pamela Brown in Tales of Hoffman, too. And let’s not forget Secret Ceremony.
Powell was potty about redheads. And a very naughty man. I believe I’ve mentioned that during Black Narcisssus, he dumped Kathleen Byron in favor of Deborah Kerr. Talk about “subtext”!!!
Moira Shearer was alos a redhead. And when he met Tilda Swinton, Powell just about fainted.
On the non-redhead front leave us not forget the delightful appearance in IKWIG of a young and pert Petula Clark.
February 1, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I think perhaps nobody but Powell would have cast Anna Massey in a lead role in Peeping Tom — she’s so unlike traditional leading ladies of the time. But Anna was Raymond Massey’s daughter, and she’s brilliant.
Kathleen Byron says Powell would invite her to premieres then never appear to collect her, then she’d see him in the papers the next day with somebody else!
It’s criminal how British cinema has neglected her.
*
Yes, Pinter followed the course of many actors by moving up the class ladder, but the British never let you forget where you came from. But with his amazing ear he’s been able to pick up the speech patterns of everyone along the way (although of course they all get filtered through Pinterama.
Kenneth Williams, subversive to the last, had this trick of dropping about eight rungs down that ladder in mid sentence, varying from plummy upper-crust to cockney barrow-boy in the space of a syllabyl. He trashes the whole idea of social distinction by accent.
February 1, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Tell me about it – I have no accent whatsoever, sort of RP I suppose, which meant that I was often ribbed for it growing up in Stoke on Trent (kids often told me to say “book” and “bath” properly). Then I moved to North Wales (where all my family are from) and everytime I opened my mouth and sounded English they would ask where I’m from and when I answered Stoke they’d say, “You don’t sound like it”.
I once saw George Melly on an interview and he said how annoyed he got when people said “You’re from Liverpool? How’s that, did you take elocution lessons?” And he’d answer “You get middle-class people everywhere.” I wish I’d been able to explain that to people when I was younger. It also accounts for why the accent would rub people up the wrong way in a predominantly working class post-industrial area.
February 1, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Everybody has an accent! You just have a middle-class accent, which the BBC tried to promote as “standard”. But I bet an American could instantly recognise you as British by your voice.
When I was at school here in Scotland, English accents were just about acceptable, but “posh” accents were viewed with suspicion. A lot of unthinking anti-English sentiment is really unthinking anti-middle-class sentiment in disguise.
School is like a distorting mirror version of society, but it also has its own unique and horrible qualities…that’s my only problem with Gregory’s Girl, it completely ignores the nastiness, which is one of my abiding memories of the whole skool experience.
February 1, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Well the “no accent” statement comes from my Dad really, and he means no specific British accent. He has a Wrexham accent that has softened over the years. My mum was the main influence in teaching my brother and me to speak and she went to a private boarding school so it was almost posh. Over a few years we watched so much TV, particularly kids TV, that we both ended up with something really middle of the road. I don’t think you could pinpoint a county in the south or the midlands that we might “come from”.
February 1, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Thank you for IKWIG. It’s just one big enormous dollop of euphoria for me. Another film that triggers the teary functions right from the start and never lets go. Good on Criterion for including the wonderful Mark Cousins docu on their disc. P&P created a triumvirate of magnificent, unsentimental but emotionally overflowing films with this, A Matter of Life and Death and A Canterbury Tale. Beautiful.
February 1, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Jenny: I myself has an accent that gets mistaken for American by the English and Irish by the Americans. A Northern Irish friend even thought I must be from his neck of the woods. I blame Fantastic Four comics and Starsky and Hutch. And speech therapy.
Mike: I think P&P have an unbroken record of genius from 1944 to 1949, and the weaker films before and after are still very good, with several more outright masterpieces. There hasn’t been anyone to compare, and I say that as an admirer of many many other British filmmakers.
Checking their credits I note that Pressburger scripted on They’re a Weird Mob, Powell’s first Australian film. I have a copy of that and I must watch it. Former Edinburgh Film Fest director Shane Danielsen, a Powell-lover, hates it, but he says it’s because it’s too authentic a portrait of the Australia he grew up in. But that makes it at least somewhat interesting to me…