The Edge of the World

Director Michael Powell's 1937 breakthrough was inspired by a newspaper account of the evacuation of a remote Scottish island where bad harvests and competition from commercial fishing had doomed the dwellers' pre-industrial ways. Powell makes the event less the climax than the epilogue to a slender but resonant story that turns on the conflict between two young men, Robbie (Eric Berry), who plans to leave for the mainland, and Andrew (Niall MacGinnis), who believes the island can survive. The community pretends that its future can be decided by one of "the old trials": a ropeless cliff-climbing race between Andrew and Robbie. But the tragic outcome merely postpones the inevitable.

The Edge of the World embodies some of the qualities of Powell's later masterpieces, such as I Know Where I'm Going and Black Narcissus: his fascination with isolated groups, his mystical feeling for nature, and his ambivalence about tradition. Most of the film was shot, under rugged conditions, on Foula, one of the Shetland Islands, and Powell makes spectacular use of the landscape. More poetry than ethnography, Edge weaves lyrical interludes out of the local customs and has as much visual wildness as any Powell film -- which means as much as any film ever made.

-- Chris Fujiwara