Filmmaker Michael Powell will always be remembered for his 18-year collaboration with co-writer and director Emeric Pressburger, which yielded such literate, cinematic, and influential productions as Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, and The Tales Of Hoffmann. But his career was bookended by a couple of fascinating personal projects that have only recently received the attention they deserve. The first to be reissued was 1960's Peeping Tom, a lurid psychosexual thriller concerning voyeurism and cinema that effectively ended Powell's career, but which is now widely acknowledged as his most groundbreaking film. The second, 1937's The Edge Of The World, doesn't have quite the same impact, but as a formative work, it shows signs of Powell's technical prowess and reflects a fiercely independent vision that would surface in later efforts. An uneasy mix of ethnography and melodrama, The Edge Of The World takes place on a majestic island off the coast of Scotland, home to a tight-knit community threatened with certain extinction by poor harvests and trawlers that plunder the fishing beds. Perched on jagged cliffs that hover about a quarter-mile above the ocean, the residents of Hirta (meaning "death") face the mainland with foreboding glances as they fight their inevitable absorption into society at large. Their struggles are dramatized in the thinly conceived story of three friends—lovers Niall MacGinnis and Belle Chrystall, and Chrystall's brother Eric Berry—whose fortunes are tragically altered by an argument about the island's future. The conflict leads to the film's most impressive set piece, a rock-climbing competition (without ropes up a steep incline) that climaxes in a flurry of impressionistic montage. Powell's respect for the community's idealism and determination makes its demise all the more bittersweet, leading to a haunting denouement in an enveloping shroud of fog.