Amazon.com video review:
Michael Powell broke with a decade of B movies with this
personal project shot on the North Sea island of Foula, a magnificent,
primal landscape of high, rocky inland plains and sheer cliffs jutting
out of the sea like a dare. He renamed the island Hirta for this
fictional story (based on the real-life evacuation of the island of St.
Kilda) of an isolated community's traditional way of life slowly dying
as the young men are drawn to the modern cities of the mainland. John
Laurie and Finlay Currie play the two family patriarchs who struggle
over the future of the island community, and Powell himself appears as
the yachtsman in a framing sequence. The romantic melodrama at the
heart of the tale turns on a breathtaking race up the sheer cliffs and
the grudge it sparks when one of the climbers falls to his death.
The Edge of the World is more stately and still than Powell's
cinematically playful and stylistically vibrant later films like The
Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. The proud, hard residents of
the island are constantly framed against the dramatic sky, the craggy
mountains, or the rolling meadows with a dire seriousness. Yet there's
a poetry to his images, which are never less than gorgeous, and Powell
directs with a sense of tension, urgency, and desperation that pulls at
the easy pace of this harsh lifestyle. This edition also features the
lovely 1941 short An Airman's Letter to His Mother (narrated by
John Gielgud) and the Powells' 1978 documentary Return to the Edge
of the World, a 22-minute remembrance organized around a reunion on
the island of Foula. --Sean Axmaker
