I Know Where I'm Going!

I Know Where I'm Going! (Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, 1945) Wendy Hiller stars as Joan Webster, a determined woman whose whole life has been planned out and played out according to her own well thought-out scenario. Now, she's traveling to the Scottish Highlands to marry her industrialist fianceé (head of Consolidated Chemical Industries) on the Island of Kiloran. But to get there—and become "Mrs. Consolidated Chemical Industries"—she must book boat passage from the Island of Mull. But Nature and Fate conspire to keep her Mulling and scuttle her schedule, while the cutely eccentric citizens cast a spell all their own.

 

By all accounts, it should never have been made. Powell and Pressburger were going to make A Matter of Live and Death for the Rank Organization after a request that they make a film that might help cement relationships between the British and Americans. But, the plan was to make A Matter of Life and Death partially in Technicolor (why "partially" is best explained by seeing the movie). But with all the Technicolor cameras being used by the American military for training films, The Archers (the company name of Powell and Pressburger) had to delay filming until they became available.

 

What to do in the meantime?

Pressburger knew that Powell loved spending his initial down-time after a movie by going to the Scottish islands and proposed a story about a woman who wanted to make a transit to an island but couldn't and by the time one's available she's made the decision that she no longer wants to go.

Pressburger wrote the story in a whirlwind four days, and Powell and he fine-tuned over a matter of a couple weeks. Initially to star Deborah Kerr and James Mason, The Archers had to navigate their own troubled waters as Kerr had a contract at M-G-M and couldn't get out of her commitment (either that or Powell and Pressburger didn't have the money—they certainly didn't!—to pay M-G-M to loan her out) and Mason didn't want to spend his days "camping out" with the crew in an out-of-the-way location. Wendy Hiller, whom Powell and Pressburger had wanted for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—her parts had been played instead by Kerr!—was signed and Roger Livesey was ultimately cast as one of the island's residents (ironically Livesey was doing a play in London and never went to the Hebrides locations, but did his part in the studio filming—Mason needn't have worried about the rough conditions).

For Powell and Pressburger, it was something of a lark, and allowed them to continue an anti-materialist theme that they'd started with their previous film, A Canterbury Tale, of the aesthetics of rural life, while also breaking their four-film streak of making war films. A whimsical love story was just what was needed. A whimsical love-story with a third-act action sequence where our heroes nearly drown in the Corryvreckan whirlpool, but a delightful one, nonetheless.

 

Powell and Pressburger create a film concoction with fantasy elements, surreal dream sequences and musical interludes, taking a straightforward story and applying an extremely creative approach to it. The story may seem overly familiar, but not the approach to it which keeps one watching intently to see not so much what will happen, but how. No less an expert as writer Raymond Chandler wrote of it: "I've never seen a picture which smelled of the wind and rain in quite this way nor one which so beautifully exploited the kind of scenery people actually live with, rather than the kind which is commercialised as a show place."

 

It's a lost little gem that shows what a creative force "The Archers", the team that made The Red Shoes, could be. Also, look for a short appearance by a child-actress named Petula Clark. Yup, that one.

My Fair Lady: Much Ado About Doolittle

My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)

One day I'll be famous, I'll be proper and prim 

Go to Saint James so often I will call it Saint Jim 

One evening the king will say Oh Liza, old thing, 

I want all of England your praises to sing 

Next week, on the twentieth of May 

I'll proclaim Liza Doolittle day 

All the people will celebrate the glory of you 

And whatever you wish and want I gladly will do 

Thanks a lot, King says I in a manner well-bred 

But all I want is Henry Higgins 'ead

"Just You Wait, Henry Higgins"

'Tis the 20th of May, and I have come here to argue the future of Ms. Eliza Doolittle. Just the fact that I use that title no doubt betrays my feelings on the matter. 

The movie that studio mogul Jack Warner made of the Lerner and Lowe musical version of "Pygmalion" is a faithful adaptation of the famous Broadway hit (although I find it—despite the many joys of Cukor playing up the fantasy, but making the film immaculately stage-bound—rather elephantine, looking (ironically) at any nearby time-piece around the "Get Me To the Church On Time" number. And the musical is a faithful adaptation of the 1938 film version of Pygmalion, starring Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard, the screenplay of which is credited to Bernard Shaw*, who wrote the original play. It's a bit more faithful to that movie than the play itself, given the note on which the author ended it.

You know the story: based of the Greek myth of Pygmalion—a sculptor who fell in love with a statue of his making—"Pygmalion"/My Fair Lady tells the story of an academic of grammar, who attempts to turn a cockney flower-girl into a lady of manners, able to pass the scrutiny of the upper-class. The "expert dialectician and grammarian", Prof. Henry Higgins, espouses a belief that the class system is a charade, a veil or pretense in society that is, with the proper dialect and appropriate apparel that can be exposed as a mere veneer. The secret is that Higgins is so comfortable in his own place in society that he can act like a lout and not be considered base.

Higgins is also a misogynist, which makes his taking on the transformation of flower-girl Eliza Doolittle a task that makes him susceptible to transmogrifying his role as teacher/mentor/task-master to possessiveness and coveting her, and then taking umbrage when her transformation emboldens her independent spirit. Once you're used to be the upper-hand of uneven power dynamic, any change will feel like a sacrifice. He will always see her as a creature of the gutter—and never let her forget it—even while he has fallen in love with his creation. Never mind that her soul is of her own making and not his, and she is an individual with her own thinking, her own wishes and dreams, far removed from that of her manipulator.** In Higgins' mind, a student should always be subservient.

Shaw understood that. He took umbrage with producers and directors who would change his play's ending—Eliza chooses a life of independence and walks out on Higgins—and impose a "happy ending" where Eliza comes back to the professor, to supposedly live a life of dependence. Most gallingly, Higgins reacts to this (in the 1938 presentation and the musical) with the line "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?" It's a knife in the back of an already appalling scene.

Shaw added a post-script to his play, entitled "What Happened Afterwards" in which he argues that, despite the apparent need to sustain the relationship between the two lead characters, it runs counter to his intent of the play (and the inspiration for it). Still, when the 1938 film was made, the producers plopped a five second shot of Eliza, present in the room, returned like an obedient pet, and the musical-makers took their cue from it.

It is so wrong. The triumph of Eliza Doolittle is her own, merely proctored by the professor. Why should she come back, when the musical numbers make their mutual antipathy so clear? Eliza, at one point, imagines overseeing Higgins' demise ("Just You Wait, Henry Higgins") and towards the end calls him out on his narcissism and egotism ("Without You"—"so go back in your shell, I can do bloody well...").

In My Fair Lady, Higgins is given the final number, expressing his feelings for Eliza, both pro and con ("I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face"—really, is that the best you can do?) as he vacillates between his own fantasies of the disastrous consequences of her leaving him and his own measured longing for her. This is not a match made in heaven...even if it sells in the box office.

In recent years, there have been experiments—Bartlett Sher's revival had Eliza return, Higgins delivers his "slippers" line, and then Eliza exits the stage through the audience. Okay, if you want to remain true to the text and the spirit of the film. But, better to be true to Shaw. Instead, have Higgins crawl back to his shell of a study, play his gramophone of Eliza's voice ("I washed me face and hands before I came, I did...") and have him say the line "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers" to empty air, leaving him true to his nature, for all the bloody good it does him. 

Give him his scene, his song, his recordings and his memory and leave him with that. And his illusions.

It may be a tragedy for him. But, it's a triumph for Eliza.

* Also credited are Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple, and W.P. Lipscomb, who all won that year's Oscar for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay). Shaw added the ballroom scene with Karpathy and added montages of the training (which were directed and edited by a young David Lean).

** If you're looking for a comparable theme in the movies, Vertigo springs immediately to mind, as well as the tendency of its director, Alfred Hitchcock, to transform his actresses into his image of perfection, and then treat them—particularly "Tippi" Hedren—abominably, when they didn't acquiesce to his needs.

I'll use any excuse to show Bob Peak's poster-art