I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING
A film review by Joseph C. Fineman
Copyright 1993 Joseph C. Fineman
I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING. British, late '40s. Seen because Orwell mentions it a couple of times, and because I am fond of the song it is named after:
Featherbeds are soft,
And painted rooms are bonnie,
But I wad give them a'
For my handsome, winsome Johnnie.
Like the song, the movie is about a woman who knows what she wants, or anyway thinks she does. She is the daughter of a banker, and has made what she considers a good catch--a rich industrialist. Her father disapproves (I suppose because it means marrying into trade?), but she stays her course. Her fiance has rented an island off the west coast of Scotland for the duration of World War II, and that is where the wedding is to be, but several days of bad weather keep her from making the last leg of the trip there, which has to be made in a small boat, past a dangerous whirlpool. So she is stuck on another island, where there is a handsome young man (a soldier? it was three weeks ago and I can't remember) whose intentions are honorable. She feels herself falling in love with him, and becomes desperate to get away from him and to her fiance. The owner of the boat will not try the passage until he judges it to be safe. However, he has a son, perhaps sixteen, who is engaged to a young lady on the island but expects it to be several years before he has saved up the money he needs to marry her. The banker's daughter offers him the whole sum at once if he will take her to the other island. He agrees. His fiancee hears about it and scolds her eloquently: I was willing to wait four years for my lover, while you are willing to risk his life so you can jump into bed with yours tonight. The honorable young man hears he is the cause of it all and insists on going too. They go out, but are beaten back by a squall and nearly drowned in the whirlpool; they make it home, and the boatman gives his son a sickening dressing-down.
Thereupon the banker's daughter walks off into the sunset with the handsome young man, because God damn! this is a *comedy*. None of the misery she has caused counts. We are not supposed to care about the invisible industrialist's disappointment, because (I guess) he is rich (and a draft dodger?) and therefore wicked. We are not supposed to care about the boy's humiliation, because (I guess) he is poor and therefore inconsequential. We are supposed to pay attention to the middle-class lady's hormones, and be amused at how they and all those other props conspire to prove that a woman cannot, after all, know what she wants.
The song is actually sung now and then during the movie, as background music, without much art or conviction. It tells a different story:
Some say he's black,
But I say he's bonnie.
Fairest of them a'
Is my handsome, winsome Johnnie.
In this, as in many other Scottish songs (c.f. "Eppie Morrie," "The False Lover Won Back"), the heroine is shown to know what she wants and how to get it.
Orwell mentioned the movie in a couple of letters because he was nearly done in by the same whirlpool. He does not say what he thought of it, but I imagine he was entertained by the class angle.
[Review written November 1990]
-- Joe Fineman jcf@world.std.com
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