The Wicker Man (15.)
Directed by Robin Hardy.
1973. Starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento, Morris Aubrey, Lindsay Kemp and Ingrid Pitt. 93 mins
If you are fool enough to venture out of the protective domain of the M25 on a May Day Bank Holiday, to some pastoral village green or seaside resort you are likely to encounter the residents involved in various Jack In The Green festivities. These mishmashes of Maypoles, Morris dancing and face painting front up as harmless excuses for people to get in fancy dress and get drunk but it’s not hard to discern a sinister, pagan aspect to it. Some of these ancient rites date back over two whole decades, to the Moviedrome screening of The Wicker Man one BBC2 Sunday night in the late eighties.
The cult of The Wicker Man has bobbed along for the last forty years picking up plenty of alluring details: it was initially the support film in a double bill with Don’t Look Now and has gone through numerous different edits that were never quite the original version. For this 40th anniversary StudioCanal put out a call for help finding bits of the original negative but though this is being marketed as The Final Version it’s not radically different from the version that’s been shown on TV regularly. Still whatever version it is I think it is always going to be effective as long as those phenomenal last ten minutes are intact.
It must be assumed that the rerelease is going to lure in some people who have never seen it before, attracted by quotes about this being The Best British Horror Film Ever Made. (Spoilers follow.) Their faces will be a picture as they sit through what looks like a Hammer film of a Dennis Wheatley book that they have decided to adapt as a musical version of the kind of sex comedy that was popular at the time. Everybody on the remote Scottish island is sex mad and if they aren’t groping each other or rolling in the grass they are bursting into song about it.
It looks pretty shoddy too, with clumsy edits but whether through luck or judgement that just adds to it. The film making echoes the plot – this silliness is there to draw us in, get our defences down. In the final half hour the level of film making, even the quality of the picture rises sharply and it builds towards one of the great finales.
Christopher Lee is good as Lord Summerisle but the film’s great glory is the spellbinding performance by Edward Woodward as the priggish Christian policeman. I was born just a little too late to really fully appreciate Woodward. He was always so impossible upright and well bred, like a former public school master now reduced to teaching in a comprehensive. The film uses that quality perfectly and although the film clearly sides with the degenerate islander (well it was the 70s and era of free love) and plays his character as a priggish fool, it’s his dignity at the end that gives the film all its ferocious kick.
Sure the final image of the burning wicker man is powerful but if it wasn’t for Woodward and the force with which he delivers the line “Oh Jesus Christ,” I don’t think anyone would be rifling through canisters of film or digging up pylons on the M4 looking for lost scenes of the Wicker Man.
Directed by Robin Hardy.
1973. Starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento, Morris Aubrey, Lindsay Kemp and Ingrid Pitt. 93 mins
If you are fool enough to venture out of the protective domain of the M25 on a May Day Bank Holiday, to some pastoral village green or seaside resort you are likely to encounter the residents involved in various Jack In The Green festivities. These mishmashes of Maypoles, Morris dancing and face painting front up as harmless excuses for people to get in fancy dress and get drunk but it’s not hard to discern a sinister, pagan aspect to it. Some of these ancient rites date back over two whole decades, to the Moviedrome screening of The Wicker Man one BBC2 Sunday night in the late eighties.
The cult of The Wicker Man has bobbed along for the last forty years picking up plenty of alluring details: it was initially the support film in a double bill with Don’t Look Now and has gone through numerous different edits that were never quite the original version. For this 40th anniversary StudioCanal put out a call for help finding bits of the original negative but though this is being marketed as The Final Version it’s not radically different from the version that’s been shown on TV regularly. Still whatever version it is I think it is always going to be effective as long as those phenomenal last ten minutes are intact.
It must be assumed that the rerelease is going to lure in some people who have never seen it before, attracted by quotes about this being The Best British Horror Film Ever Made. (Spoilers follow.) Their faces will be a picture as they sit through what looks like a Hammer film of a Dennis Wheatley book that they have decided to adapt as a musical version of the kind of sex comedy that was popular at the time. Everybody on the remote Scottish island is sex mad and if they aren’t groping each other or rolling in the grass they are bursting into song about it.
It looks pretty shoddy too, with clumsy edits but whether through luck or judgement that just adds to it. The film making echoes the plot – this silliness is there to draw us in, get our defences down. In the final half hour the level of film making, even the quality of the picture rises sharply and it builds towards one of the great finales.
Christopher Lee is good as Lord Summerisle but the film’s great glory is the spellbinding performance by Edward Woodward as the priggish Christian policeman. I was born just a little too late to really fully appreciate Woodward. He was always so impossible upright and well bred, like a former public school master now reduced to teaching in a comprehensive. The film uses that quality perfectly and although the film clearly sides with the degenerate islander (well it was the 70s and era of free love) and plays his character as a priggish fool, it’s his dignity at the end that gives the film all its ferocious kick.
Sure the final image of the burning wicker man is powerful but if it wasn’t for Woodward and the force with which he delivers the line “Oh Jesus Christ,” I don’t think anyone would be rifling through canisters of film or digging up pylons on the M4 looking for lost scenes of the Wicker Man.
