The Wicker Man is a
1973 British horror film, combining
thriller,
existential horror
and
musical genres, directed by
Robin Hardy and written
by
Anthony Shaffer. The film stars
Edward Woodward,
Christopher Lee,
Diane Cilento,
Ingrid
Pitt and
Britt Ekland.
Paul Giovanni composed the soundtrack. The
film is now considered a
cult
classic.
Based very loosely on David Pinner's 1967
novel The Ritual, the story is about a
Scottish police officer, Sergeant
Neil Howie, visiting the isolated island of
Summerisle to search for a
missing girl who the locals claim never existed. The inhabitants of
Summerisle all celebrate a reconstructed form of
Celtic paganism, which appalls the devoutly
Christian Sergeant.
The Wicker Man is generally well regarded by critics and
film enthusiasts. Film magazine
Cinefantastique described it as "The
Citizen Kane of Horror
Movies", and during 2004 the magazine
Total Film named
The Wicker Man the
sixth greatest British film of all time. It also won the 1978
Saturn Award for
Best Horror Film. A scene
from this film was #45 on
Bravo's
100 Scariest Movie
Moments.
The work was later allocated as the first film of
The Wicker Man Trilogy, with a
sequel entitled
The Wicker Tree, based on the book
Cowboys for Christ by
Robin Hardy, currently in production. A third film,
The
Twilight of the Gods, is set for a later release.
A badly-received
2006
American remake has also been produced, from which Robin Hardy
and other people associated with the original disassociated
themselves. A stage adaptation was attempted at the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe in
August 2009, but the project fell through.
Plot
Police
Sergeant Neil Howie is sent an anonymous letter recommending that
he investigate the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison,
on the remote Hebridean
island of Summerisle (a fictional
island apparently inspired by the real-life Summer Isles
of the Inner Hebrides
).
He flies to the island and during his investigations discovers that
the entire population celebrates a
Celtic neo-pagan cult, believing in
re-incarnation,
worshipping the
sun and engaging in
fertility rituals and
sexual magic in order to appease
immanent natural forces.
Howie, a celibate devout
Christian,
becomes increasingly disturbed by the islanders' behaviour. In the
original uncut version of the film, he witnesses couples copulating
in the church yard, in addition to finding a naked woman sobbing on
a grave. He angrily threatens to involve the authorities after
discovering the school mistress (
Diane
Cilento) is teaching young girls about the phallic importance
of the
maypole. Amulets such as the hag
stone, toad stone, and snail stone, and the supposed cure of the
whooping cough by placing a toad in a
child's mouth, closely resemble descriptions found in the book
Animal Simples.
Howie finds himself attracted strongly to Willow, the sexually
liberated daughter of the landlord. In the restored director's cut
of the film, Lord Summerisle refers to Willow as
Aphrodite when presenting her with a young male
adolescent to seduce. Howie cannot help but overhear their
passionate lovemaking. To compound matters, Willow tries to seduce
him the following night, dancing naked and beating upon his bedroom
wall, but Howie resists the torment because he does not believe in
sex before marriage.
After interviewing many of the islanders - all of whom claim never
to have heard of Rowan Morrison - Howie calls upon the
island's owner Lord Summerisle (
Christopher Lee), who is the island's
magistrate. Howie hopes Summerisle will
assist him with his inquiries. However, Summerisle counteracts the
policeman's arguments robustly. After Howie objects to the sight of
naked girls jumping over a fire hoping for supernatural
impregnation, he reminds him that Jesus was "Himself the son of a
virgin, impregnated - I believe - by a ghost". When Howie accuses
the laird of advocating pagan beliefs, Summerisle responds by
saying "A heathen conceivably, but not, I hope, an unenlightened
one". Crucially, Lord Summerisle talks of appeasing and
propitiating "the old gods".
The policeman leaves after obtaining the laird's permission to
exhume the body of Rowan Morrison from a grave in the island's
unconsecrated church yard. In the coffin, he discovers the fresh
corpse of a
hare, an animal with well-known
supernatural connotations. After
breaking into the local chemist to develop missing film proving
Rowan's existence, Howie experiences an
epiphany. He realizes that Rowan is still
alive and that the islanders are proposing to "appease" the old
gods by making a
Mayday sacrifice. He
assumes that she is to be the intended sacrifice, whereupon he
instigates a search of the island. Howie does not receive any
assistance in his quest from the islanders.
Failing to discover where Rowan is hidden, Howie disguises himself
as
Punch, a principal character of
the
May Day festival, hoping to strike at
the root of the mystery. He joins the bizarre procession of
islanders as they cavort through the town and up to the cliffs.
After he survives a sword-beheading ceremony, Rowan is finally
revealed. Howie grabs her and flees through a cave but emerges at
the other end on a precipice where Lord Summerisle and his
followers await. Lord Summerisle then reveals that Rowan's
disappearance was all an elaborate hoax conspired by everyone on
the island to bring Howie to them. Howie, not Rowan, is the
intended sacrifice, and the islanders believe his death will
restore the fertility of their orchards.
Villagers prepare the Wicker Man for
Sgt.
Lord Summerisle and his followers explain to him that his sacrifice
will be effective because Howie came to them of his own free will;
as a virgin; with the power of a king (by representing the law);
and as a fool ("You are the Fool, Mr. Howie: Punch, one of the
great fool-victims in history! For you have accepted the role of
King-For-A-Day, and who but a Fool would do that?" asks the school
mistress, referring to the way that Howie has conducted his
investigations). Howie in turn admonishes them, claiming that
killing him will not restore their fertility and that they all
would be guilty of murder. He argues that if the crops fail next
year they will have to sacrifice Summerisle. Lord Summerisle
asserts that Howie's sacrifice will prove efficacious.
The policeman is dragged screaming into the belly of a large hollow
wicker statue of a man which is
subsequently ignited.In the final scene of the film, the islanders
surround the burning wicker man and sing the
Middle English folk-song "
Sumer Is Icumen In" while the terrified
Howie shouts out
Psalm 23. The film ends
with the Wicker Man engulfed in flames, and collapsing in front of
the setting sun.
Background & production
Christopher Lee was well known as a
Hammer Films regular, in particular
playing Dracula in a series of successful films. At the time, Lee
wanted to expand his acting roles, and collaborated with
British Lion head
Peter Snell and playwright Anthony Shaffer
(already well known for
Sleuth) to develop a film based on the
David Pinner novel. Though the book was all but completely
abandoned (all that survived from Pinner's book into the finished
film is the scene in which Howie presses himself against his
bedroom wall as a means of communing with the
siren-like calls of Willow next door), the idea of an
idealistic confrontation between a modern Christian and a remote,
pagan community continued to intrigue Shaffer, who performed
painstaking research on the topic. Brainstorming with director
Robin Hardy, the film was conceived as presenting the pagan
elements objectively and accurately, accompanied by authentic music
and a believable, contemporary setting.
Television actor
Edward Woodward was
cast in the role of the policeman after the part was declined by
both
Michael York and
David Hemmings. In Britain Woodward was best
know for the role of
Callan, which he played from
1967 to 1972. He came to international attention portraying the
title character of the
1980 Australian
film
Breaker Morant.
(American audiences probably know Woodward best for his role in the
1980s CBS TV series
The
Equalizer.)
Diane Cilento was lured out of semi-retirement after Shaffer saw
her on the stage to play the town's schoolmistress, and Ingrid Pitt
(another British horror film veteran) was cast as the town
librarian and registrar. The Swedish actress
Britt Ekland was cast as the innkeeper's
lascivious daughter (perhaps for box office appeal), though her
singing and possibly all her dialogue was redubbed by
Annie Ross, and some of her nude dancing was
performed by a double called Jane Jackson who lived in Castle
Douglas at the time.
The film was produced at a time of crisis for the British film
industry. The studio in charge of production,
British Lion Films, was in financial
trouble and was bought by wealthy businessman
John Bentley. To convince the
unions that he was not about to
asset-strip the company, Bentley needed to
get a film into production quickly. This meant that
The Wicker
Man, a film set during spring, was actually filmed in October:
artificial leaves and blossoms had to be glued to trees in many
scenes. The scenes at Culzean Castle were filmed during February,
1972. The production was kept on a small budget. Christopher Lee
was extremely keen to get the film made; he and others worked on
the production without pay. While filming took place, British Lion
was bought by
EMI Films.
The film
was filmed almost entirely in the small Scottish towns of Gatehouse of
Fleet
, Newton
Stewart
, Kirkcudbright
and a few scenes in the village of Creetown
in Dumfries and Galloway, as well as
Plockton
in Lochaber. Culzean Castle
in Ayrshire
and its grounds were also used for much of the
shooting. Some of the opening flying shoots feature the
Isle of
Skye
, including the spectacular pinnacles of The Old Man
of Storr, and the Quaraing. The end burning of the Wicker
Man occurred at
Burrow Head (on a
caravan site).
Cast and crew
Distribution
By the time of the film's completion the studio had been bought by
EMI, and British Lion was now managed by
Michael Deeley. The DVD commentary
track states that studio executives suggested a more "upbeat"
ending to the film, in which a sudden rain puts the flames of the
wicker man out and spares Howie's life, but this suggestion was
refused. Hardy subsequently had to remove approximately 20 minutes
of scenes on the mainland, early investigations, and (to Lee's
disappointment) some of Lord Summerisle's initial meeting with
Howie.
A copy of
a finished, 99 minute film was sent to American
film producer Roger Corman in Hollywood
to make a judgment of how to market the film in the
USA. Corman recommended an additional 13 minutes be
eliminated from the film. (Corman did not acquire US release
rights, and eventually
Warner Bros.
test-marketed the film in drive-ins.) In Britain, the film was
ordered reduced to roughly 87 minutes, with some narrative
restructuring, and released as the
"B"
picture on a double bill with
Don't Look Now. Despite Lee's claims
that the reduction had disturbed the film's
continuity, he urged local critics to
see the film, even going so far as to offer to pay for their
seats.
Restorations
The film was restored and re-released
theatrically in 1979.
During the mid-1970s, Hardy made inquiries about the film, hoping
to restore it to his original vision. Along with Lee and Shaffer,
Hardy searched for his original version or raw footage. Both of
these appeared to have been lost.
Alex Cox
said that the negative "ended up in the pylons that support the
M4 motorway" in his
Moviedrome introduction of 1988.
Hardy remembered that a copy of the film, prior to Deeley's cuts,
was sent to Roger Corman; it turned out that Corman still had a
copy, possibly the only existing print of Hardy's version. The US
rights had been sold by Warner Bros. to a small firm called
Abraxas, managed by film buff
Stirling
Smith and critic
John Simon. Stirling
agreed to an American re-release of Hardy's reconstructed version.
Hardy restored the narrative structure, some of the erotic elements
which had been excised, and a very brief pre-title segment of Howie
on the mainland (appearing at a church with his fiancée). A 96
minute restored version was released January, 1979, again to
critical acclaim. Strangely, the original full-length film was
available in the US on VHS home video from Media Home Entertainment
(and later, Magnum) during the 1980s and 1990s. This video included
additional, early scenes in Howie's police station that Hardy had
left out of the 1979 version.
During 2001 the film's new worldwide rights owners,
Canal+, began an effort to release the
full-length film. Corman's full-length film copy had been lost, but
a
telecine transfer to 1-inch videotape
existed. With this copy, missing elements were combined with film
elements from the previous versions. (In particular, additional
scenes of Howie on the mainland were restored, showing the chaste
bachelor to be the object of gossip at his police station, and
establishing his rigidly devout posture.) The DVD "Extended
version" released by Canal+ (with
Anchor Bay Entertainment handling
US DVD distribution) is this hybrid version, considered the longest
and closest version to Hardy's original, 99 minute version of the
film. A two-disc limited edition set was sold with both the
shortened, theatrical release version and the newly restored
extended version, and a retrospective documentary,
The Wicker
Man Enigma. During 2005,
Inside The Wicker Man author
Allan Brown revealed he had discovered a series of stills taken
on-set during the film's production showing the shooting of a
number of sequences from the script that had never been seen
before; indeed, it had never been certain that these scenes had
actually been filmed. They include a scene in which Howie closes a
mainland pub that is open after-hours, has an encounter with a
prostitute, receives a massage from Willow McGregor and observes a
brutal confrontation between Oak and a villager in The Green Man
pub. These images might be featured in a revised edition of the
book
Inside The Wicker Man.
Anchor Bay Entertainment released a limited edition wooden box of
The Wicker Man. 50,000 2-disk sets were made, and 20 of
them were signed by actors Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward,
writer Anthony Shaffer, producer Peter Snell, and director Robin
Hardy.
Reception
The
Wicker Man had moderate success and won first prize in the
1974 Festival of Fantastic Films in Paris
, but largely
slipped into obscurity. However, the American film magazine,
Cinefantastique, devoted a
commemorative issue to the film in 1977 — the praise that the film
is "the
Citizen Kane of horror
movies" has been attributed to this issue.
During
2003 the Crichton Campus of the University of Glasgow
in Dumfries and
Galloway hosted a three-day conference on The Wicker
Man. The conference spawned two collections of articles about
the film.
During 2006,
The Wicker Man ranked 44th in the Scariest
Movie Moments Of All Time on Bravo
Wicker Man starlet Britt Ekland appeared (recorded live)
on the British TV show
Friday Night with Jonathan
Ross on
BBC1 on Feb 1, 2008. Ross
described the movie as one of his "all time favourites" and the
BBC show also screened the infamous
"wall-slapping" clip from
The Wicker Man. Britt explained
that she had refused to dance fully naked in the scene (though she
did appear topless) because she had then recently discovered that
she was pregnant, and said she later found out that the body double
used for the scene was "a Glasgow stripper".
The Wicker Man ranks 485th on
Empire magazine's 2008 list of the 500
greatest movies of all time.
Soundtrack
An important and often overlooked element to the film is the
soundtrack, which often forms a major component of the narrative,
just as with other important 'arthouse' films from that era such as
Nicholas Roeg's
Performance. Memorable songs
accompany all of the crucial scenes i.e. the plane's arrival,
Willow's dancing, the maypole dance, the girls jumping through
fire, the search of the houses and the final burning scene. Indeed,
director Robin Hardy surprised the cast by suddenly announcing
midway through filming that they were making a "musical" (as per
Ingrid Pitt in a subsequent documentary).
Composed, arranged and recorded by
Paul
Giovanni and
Magnet, the
soundtrack contains folk songs performed by characters in the film.
The songs vary between traditional songs, original Giovanni
compositions and even nursery rhyme in "
Baa, Baa, Black
Sheep".
“
Willow's Song” has been covered or
sampled by various rock music bands. It was covered by the
Sneaker Pimps as "How Do", and can be heard in
the movie
Hostel (2006). The song is included
also in their 1996 release "Becoming X". Additionally, the band has
also covered "Gently Johnny" as "Johnny" and is featured as a
B-Side on their "Roll On" (1996) single.
It should be noted that the songs on the soundtrack were not, as
some have said, actual cult songs used by pagans. All the songs
were composed by Paul Giovanni, except in instances where he used
well-known lyrics such as the words from the rhyme "Baa, Baa, Black
Sheep". The song sung by the cultists of Summer Isle at the end of
the film, "
Sumer Is Icumen In" is
a real song from the mid-13th century, but is not about Pagan rites
as such. It is instead a song about Spring, or the Crucifixion if
using the Latin words.
The Memory Band performed The Wicker Man at Glastonbury at 2pm on
Saturday 27th June, onThe Park Stage, Glastonbury Festival 2009.
The Memory Band featured Dot Allison, Adem, Hannah Caughlin and
Liam Bailey from The Accidental, Jess Roberts, Joe Goddard from Hot
Chip, John Smith, Tom Page, Rob Spriggs, Quinta, Sarah Scutt and
Sarah Campbell and Dan Gibbons from East London Brass + special
guests.
Remake
An American remake, starring
Nicolas
Cage and
Ellen Burstyn and
directed by Neil LaBute was released on 1 September 2006. Robin
Hardy expressed concern about the remake. Subsequent to its
release, Hardy simply described it as a different film rather than
a remake. The remake was panned both critically and commercially.
Today it has a significant cult following as an
unintentional comedy, with several
scenes on
YouTube boasting Cage brutalizing
various women throughout and terrorizing children, a fan-made
comedy trailer of the film, and more.
Hardy is filming a "spiritual sequel" to
The Wicker Man,
which has previously gone under the working titles
May Day
Riding the Laddie and
Cowboys for Christ and is
now referred to as
The Wicker
Tree. Hardy has already published this story as a novel.
First announced during April 2000, filming on the project was
commenced on 19th July 2009 according to iMDb. It follows two young
American Christian
evangelists who travel
to Scotland; like Woodward's character in
The Wicker Man,
the two Americans are virgins who encounter a pagan
laird and his followers.
See also
Footnotes
- the 2006 remake holds a 15 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Wicker Man - Movie Reviews, Trailers, Pictures -
Rotten Tomatoes
- Exclusive: A Night with The Wicker Man / The Wicker
Tree Footage Premiere Report
14.
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=53083604&blogId=494401479
- item on the Memory Band event at Glastonbury Festival
.
References
External links
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Soundtrack
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