Michael Powell had already turned out nearly twenty-five quota quickies when he made this unique drama, which he called "the turning point of my life in art." Set in severe Foula, a North Sea island far off the coast of Scotland, the slim plot is recalled by local Niall MacGinnis, who left for the mainland after a cliff-climbing competition claimed the life of his best pal (Eric Berry). Left behind are Berry's sister (Belle Chrystall), pregnant with MacGinnis' child, and weathered patriarch John Laurie, who eventually is forced to swallow his sturdy-roots pride and admit the island's slow death at the hands of the new fishing technology across the shores. More than plot, Powell is awed by setting -- not just the community and its traditions and rituals, but also the physical Nature surrounding and overwhelming it. For all the wave-pounding and rocky landscapes, however, the film is far from soup-green Grierson documentary: even in this formative work, the concept of "realism" interests Powell solely as something to stray from. For example, in the film's two death-on-the-slopes sequences, he uses rapid cutting (mixing time and space, splicing in lightning glimpses of characters and objects) as abstraction of suspence. Working with ethnographically raw materials, Powell shapes them away from earthbound harshness and toward a mystical, full-bodied romanticism via deliberately "filmic" tropes (superimposed images, invisible choruses, limpid close-ups). More conventional than the director's later works, though no less heartfelt for that, the movie was instrumental in catching the eye of producer Alexander Korda and later landing him with fellow Archer Emeric Pressburger. (Powell would revisit the setting four decades later in Return to the Edge of the World, a slight but moving 1978 reminiscence.) With Kitty Kirwan, Finlay Currie, and Powell himself as the young yachtsman in the beginning. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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