The Edge of the World (1937) - film review

Two tourists holidaying in the Hebrides land on the deserted island of Hirta.  Their guide Andrew Gray explains that until a decade ago there was a thriving community on the island.  Encountering a gravestone with the name Peter Manson at the top of a sharp drop into the sea, Gray reveals that he was one of the islanders, once engaged to a girl named Ruth, Manson’s daughter.  Manson also had a son, Robbie, who was keen to leave the island and start a new life on the mainland.   To decide the fate of their fellow islanders, Robbie and Gray agreed to compete against one another in an ancient challenge: to ascend a steep cliff face without ropes.  Ignoring his friend’s advice, Robbie tried to use a short cut, only to plummet to his death.  Grief-stricken, Manson withdrew his consent for his daughter’s marriage and Gray moved away to the mainland, not knowing that Ruth was carrying his child...

The Edge of the World is effectively where Michael Powell’s legendary filmmaking career began.  Although he had previously made around two dozen films, mostly low budget quickies, this was the first film that he himself initiated and in which his unmistakable auteur voice is first apparent.  A jarring mix of documentary and melodrama, the film touches on a subject that had struck a profound chord with Powell, the gradual depopulation of the Hebridean islands to the northwest of Scotland as life on the islands became increasingly uneconomical.  When he began working on the film, Powell had in mind the evacuation of St Kilda in August 1930, but he was unable to make the film on this island.  Undeterred, he obtained permission to shoot the film on the island of Foula in the Shetlands (an island which is still inhabited to this day, with a population of around 30).   The arduous location shoot took four months and, according to the book which Powell subsequently wrote recounting his making of the film, consumed 200,000 feet of film.

In terms of its subject matter, narrative form and visual style, The Edge of the World is a very different proposition to the more polished and conventional films that Powell would subsequently make with his long-term collaborator Emeric Pressburger.  The narrative is as ragged and as sparse as the forbidding island landscape, the uneven drama interspersed with documentary-style interludes depicting everyday life on the island.  The film’s most lyrical passages are almost throwbacks to the silent era, masterfully composed images with an almost metaphysical eeriness and solemnity, filling the entire field of view and expressing far more than any quantity of dialogue.   With the exception of John Laurie and Finlay Currie, who both have a strong presence in the film and look as if they genuinely do belong to the wind-lashed island, the performances are generally lacklustre and characterless, but this is made up for by the sheer visual beauty of the location cinematography.   Allowing for its stilted studio pick-ups (which were presumably added so that the story made some kind of sense), The Edge of the World has a bracing realism and poetry which sets it apart from virtually every other British film of this era, and watching it today it is hard to think of another film that is anything like it.  This is a hauntingly elegiac piece of cinema, one that compels us to join its author in mourning the passing of a proud way of life that had endured for many centuries before (to quote its opening caption) falling under the slow shadow of death.

© Alex Sullivan 2012

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