Michael Powell's first independent film, "The Edge of the World" (1936) was shot on( the very forbidding) location on the westernmost of the Shetland Islands, Foula (called "Hirta" in the movie), is an almost ethnographic record of life on the edge economically as well as geographically. Eventually, the inhabitants give the island up, as had occurred on one of the Orkney Islands (St. Kilda) in 1930. A 1978 documentary, the last movie Powell made, "Return to the Edge of the World" show that the location used still had the same families and that the islanders and the film-makers liked each other.
In the 1936 movie there is a very harsh father (John Laurie) unwilling to abandon the way of live of the ancestors. He approves a very dangerous race up very steep cliffs (rising 1220 feet out of the North Sea) and does not accept responsibility). In the oncoming social change, in the theme of forbidden love in an exotic, island locale, in the ethnographic focus, and in the painterly compositions, the movie reminds me of Murnau's final masterpiece, "Tabü," though that was filmed on warmer islands. Both have archetypal vexed loves (between characters played by Belle Chrystall and Niall MacGinnis), though the one in "Edge" is forbidden by the father rather than by tribal law.
Lambert Williamson's music is sometimes effective, sometimes overwrought, often choral, and pretty much almost foregrounded. The acting is better in Powell's later "I Know Where I'm Going." The scenery is more spectacular in "Edge." The scenes of the race were obviously dangerous to film. (Powell's autobiography relates that both actors and cameramen had to be rescued with ropes multiple times.) The shots of the racing youths are intercut with shots of the women and the minister and the men in the boats below watching in montage right out of Eisenstein, who also used many closeups in his montages, most notably the Potemkin steps one. " There is also a race against time through a gale at the melodramatic end with the life of an infant at risk.
I think that the plots of both Powell's Scottish movies are unoriginal, and it is mildly amusing that Powell differentiated "Edge" from Robert Flaherty's earlier movie about a dying way of life on other North Sea islands, "Man of Aran," by saying Flaherty didn't have a story, whereas his own movie had drama. (On the other had, Flaherty claimed to be making documentaries and set up much of what he recorded.) Powell had some folk myth confrontations (not all that different from those in the medieval The Sagas of the Icelanders, set somewhat further northeast), a lot of travelog shots, and not much of a story either.
The shoot took longer than expected and the production was running out of money—and, perhaps, film stock on the very remote location—which probably accounts for the rushed ending after a leisurely paced cinematic outing in the North Atlantic.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.