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I Know Where I'm Going! is immediately visible, the train rushes into a tunnel with steam like mist, the pipe-smoking passenger leans out the window to spit. "Wales is full of folklore, you know." Chief lightkeeper (Gordon Harker) reporting for duty, his predecessors "just disappeared." The villagers believe the lighthouse to be haunted, a spectral second flare materializes on the cliff to precipitate shipwrecks. The crew includes a superstitious hulk (Herbert Lomas) and a bound lunatic (Reginald Tate), the outsiders are "a skinny bit of girl from London" (Binnie Hale) and a dapper traveler (Ian Hunter). (She might be a runaway moll or a slumming actress, he might be a reporter or an investigator, Scotland Yard or "a couple of ruddy Bolshies," maybe.) Zesty neophyte work from Michael Powell, a cylindrical spook-house full of gags. The standard inn crowded with foreboding locals instead has the constable shyly flirting with a stout barmaid, the mystery dame is a screwball lass flashing distractingly long gams after shearing a pair of laborer trousers. "God blimey, King Kong!" Games of hide and seek, a panning view of the psalm etched on a wall, a soupçon of Eisensteinian montage aboard the vessel in the fog. The supernatural can't compete with human greed, "ever hear of insurance?" Above all is the lighthouse itself, a labyrinth of oblique angles, a revolving lens of both machinery and mystery, in other words an instrument of cinema. The Edge of the World absorbs its elemental side, and Hitchcock takes notes for Jamaica Inn. With Donald Calthrop, Milton Rosmer, Barry O'Neill, Mickey Brantford, and Fewlass Llewellyn. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |