Star Review
Shortly before teaming up with Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell made The Edge of the World - a lovely lesson in the craft of filmmaking in general, and location filmaking in particular. Its subject is the depopulation of the Scottish Isles, and was filmed on the Shetland Isle of Foula through eighteen weeks in 1936, during which time cast and crew were marooned, prompting dramatic headlines in the dailies.
If in appearance beautifully straightforward (though the shoot was anything but), it is not without its own understated and mannerly artifice: the ghostly superimpositions of evacuating islanders, the leisurely cuts that build a composite picture of the island and its people during the sermon in the cramped church, the montage of islander’s faces during the service.
Speech is only used when necessary and the film is all the better for it - the wordless funeral and its telling interplay of looks is a case in point.
Sometimes the film moves into Man of Aran territory with shots of the faces of pipe smokers, the sheep-shearers (sheep-tuggers rather), and the oarsmen at sea in a storm, but the film always brings us back to the story and involves us with the fate of the islanders with a minimum of means. Partly this is down to fine casting – it is a treat to see Finlay Currie and John Laurie acting together.
In the end what is to be lost through evacuation of the island is brought out by something that could only come through filming on such an exacting location – and that is the real significance of figures silhouetted against the island light, their place and role underlined when Peter Manson names islanders when bidding them to the funeral. What will become of Jessie and Jean of Grisigarth, of Magnus of Quenister? The film might be a lament of a kind, though it’s anything but sentimental.
Graeme Hobbs on 21st October 2003
View all 228 of Graeme Hobbs’s reviews
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Film Description
Moving drama about the true story of the evacuation of 36 people from St. Kilda. The new ways of the trawler fleets are meeting the old island ways and lead to an argument between two childhood friends that they decide to settle by the ancient tradition of climbing the island's highest cliff face. Without ropes. Beautifully filmed and edited. Filming wasn't permitted on St. Kilda, so it was filmed on the remote Shetland Isle of Foula.
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The Edge of the World 
