The Wicker Man (1973)

 

“The Wicker Man” (1973)

 

Imagine an idyllic island community, where the population and the lush green landscape are equally beautiful and music constantly fills the air. Where everyone is well-fed, happy, and encouraged to pursue their every pleasure without shame or censor. An Earthy, Idealized, Pagan, Utopia, able to keep the Bigotries and Judgments of both a stale Christian Church and uptight Modern Society at bay. The only problem is that sooner or later, there will be a Price to Pay. But this isn’t too much of a challenge for these Blessed people, because as all honest pleasure-seekers understand, the best way to settle a bill is have someone else suffer the cost.

 

It is one of the boldest Horror films ever made, as it challenges the Philosophical inconsistencies and Moral Hypocrisies of most Genre films. Overwhelmingly, Horror stories are tales of Good vs. Evil, with narratives that apparently side with Good, but most of the power derives from our attraction to the Evil, think about how Character Dracula is always more attractive than Johnathan Harker. We want to have our cake and eat it too.  

 

As it happens, this film stars Christopher Lee, likely the most famous of all Dracula Actors, and a man who once held the record for getting killed (in Character) the most times in movies (Danny Trejo eventual stole that title, but only decades later). Lee was the sexiest of all Dracula’s, which was why we watched him, but also why he must almost always die in the end, but not this time.

 

This film deconstructs the hypocrisy of that template, because it makes Evil not Covertly, but Overtly, attractive while the obvious Good, a not Hypocritical Good, but a real Good, utterly insufferable.  We are seduced by the promises of the island community even though we can foresee the inevitable conclusion. The film ends in an act of Irredeemable Savagery against the wholly Innocent, the Moral, the Committed, who dies horribly at the hands of a cheering, jeering crowd, whose only motive is Irrational Fanaticism and the promise of Personal Gain.

 

It is structured as a Mystery, but one that the Audience solves early on while the Detective remains in the dark. We see this end coming but the Virtuous man does not, and the look on his face at the moment of his revelation, and his Prayers to God, and his Screams of Agony, make it all the more terrible. The Audience is left Indicted for its own Voyeurism because it achieves another subversion of what stories are supposed to do; somehow its unsurprising surprise-ending is still a shocker because we are so well-conditioned to reject the inevitable in our entertainments, so some inevitabilities carry their own kind of disorientation.

 

Edward Woodward plays a Policeman, Sgt. Neil Howie, not brilliant, but dogged, firm in his conservative Christian Faith and driven by belief in Justice. He represents the Good, but unfortunately good just happens to be humorless, priggish, intolerant and wholly unsympathetic. Woodward deserves great praise by not falling into the trap of trying to soften Howie (that would’ve subverted some of the film’s essential Themes) or making him a brute (which would’ve subverted others). He really is the Good Guy; you’re just not supposed to like him.

 

Sgt. Neil receives an anonymous letter informing him that a young girl has gone missing on the remote Scottish island of Summerisle and that this is being covered up. He flies out to investigate and what he discovers both shocks, and repeatedly distracts, him from the Missing Persons Case. It’s a community of Happy Hedonists who worship the old Celtic gods and reject Christianity. They are joyous and their world is filled with music (depending on which version you see, there are three to five significant musical numbers, qualifying this film as a Musical in the eyes of many Critics, but an odd Musical indeed). In the schools, children are taught to venerate the male genitalia and at night couples copulate openly along the road side.

 

A friendly local asks: "Can I help you, Sergeant?"

Neil: "Oh I doubt it, seeing as you're all raving mad."

 

Later, Neil rails at the local teacher, right in front of her class: “Everywhere I go on this island I see there's degeneracy!"

 

One girl displays to Neil what she has trapped inside her desk: a beetle attached by a piece of string tied to a pin. "Little old beetle goes around and round. Poor old thing."

 

He should’ve paid more attention to that.

 

As Neil reacts with outrage, but the island’s beautiful Sensualists remain remarkably friendly and tolerant of his Intolerance. Their leader, Lord Summerisle, is especially compassionate to this fish-out-of-water, this insufferable puritan in a Paradise Babylon. Summerisle is played by Actor Lee in a flat-out brilliant piece of casting; Summerisle is the Villain, and we know from his first utterance every word he says is a lie, but he’s immensely likable in every way that Neil cannot be.

 

Lord Summerisle: "I trust the sight of the young people refreshes you? They do love their divinity lessons.”

 

Neil, prissy as always, "They are naked."

 

Summerisle: "Naturally, it's much too dangerous to jump through fires with your clothes on."

 

Neil starts to lecture Summerisle on proper Christian conduct., but Summerisle responds calmly, as to a child: "He [the Christian God] had his chance - and, in modern parlance - he blew it."

 

There’s a noun that has almost dropped from the English language, but should be preserved, the mountebank. Originally applied to someone who sold patent medicines in public places, it was eventually applied to all charming, amoral, adventurers and charlatans. Though Summerisle, at first, displays apparent conviction, little by little, the oiliness in his charm becomes more telling. His faintly mocking undertone extends beyond Neil and to all his subjects. It seems as if Summerisle isn’t a True Believer of this revival of the Old Religion, more likely he views it as expedient. Summerisle represents an Evil as profound as Dracula, though many times more realistic, and the film, quite deliberately, makes difficult not to side with his Evil against Neil’s Good.

 

Lee has appeared in about 275 films, and he, himself, considers Lord Summerisle his second-best performance (number one was the title role in the biopic “Jinnah” (1997) which never was theatrically released in the US or Europe), he further insisted that “The Wicker Man” was his absolute best film. He’s not alone, Cinefantastique Magazine dubbed this “The ‘Citizen Kane’ of Horror Movies,” and Total Film ranked it the sixth greatest British film, of any Genre, ever made.

 

Also present and memorable is then-prominent Sex-Symbol Britt Ekland as Willow, daughter of the local inn owner who sends Neil into emotional crisis when she offers herself to him sexually.

 

Another horror icon, Ingrid Pitt, is deftly cast-against-type as the local librarian.

 

There are no Supernatural elements despite being built around the Rituals and Beliefs of an Occult Religion. The script was written by a Christian, Robin Hardy, also the film’s Director, and a Jew, Antony Shaffer, also the author of “Sleuth” which was both a hit Broadway play (1970) and movie (1972). It targets a Religious Faith that almost doesn’t exist anymore but ultimately questioning the validity of all Supernatural Faiths in the process.  The Scriptwriters have since stated their ambition was to create a Bloodless Horror film, so as the ink was drying on the page they were already rebelling against the Genre’s then-conventions. It was based on David Pinner’s novel “Ritual” (1967) which, despite having a positive critical reputation, remains obscure, not I, nor any other film-critic I read while preparing this essay, seems to have read the now long-out-of-print book. Repeatedly though, the film was compared to another, better known, literary work, Shirley Jackson’s classic short-story “The Lottery” (1948).

 

As I roll this film over-and-over in my head, I keep returning to how this anti-Pagan film isn’t, it makes it clear that the Ideological labels are meaningless: Here the Villains are the Pagans, while in 1992, the Salem Witch Trails, the Villains were the Christians. This film is about Deeds being more important than Faith, and when the Deed is bad enough, the label of Faith means naught.

 

So, the film is ultimately more about Real-Politic than any Doctrine of Faith. Neil is the first target of scorn because of his apparent Fanaticism, but the case is being made is that the truly dangerous Fanaticism is nestled within the broadly accepted and unchallenged Belief-Systems. Christian Neil doesn’t belong to the island and that forces a kind of Integrity on him because he represents Cognitive Dissonance; it is this community, not the outside, that is too comfortable in their World View, and that is why they slip into Barbarism in service of Propaganda. Many films condemnation Intolerance, but how many point out that even the Intolerant, like Neil, can be the main Victims of that self-same vice?

 

When I wrote the first version of this essay, I saw many news stories of Intolerants like Niel becoming Victims as mutual hostilities spiraled out of control, Justice became increasingly obsure and the scandals dragged on, and always the many always triumphed because Justice, itself, was side-lined. Theologically-leaning Citizens of the USA were, and are, publicly pilloried because of their Arrogance in believing that their Religious Freedom not only empowers them, but requires them, to Discriminate against others.  But after smugly mocking that Theocrat for a while, the story exposes that Theocrat’s opponents, when they have the Authority of the State, or a perceived Majority of the Populace, should be more conscious in avoiding becoming the Oppressor. In 2012 a Baker named Jack Phillips refused two customers service because they were Gay, he was soon hit with a life-cripplingly huge fine; so the Fool and Villain of the first half of the story is the Victim of Persecution in the second half. In 2015, Government Clerk Kim Davis tried to defy the Supreme Court of the USA and deny a Gay Couple the Right to Marry; she was an outrageous embarrassment for sure, but was it really OK to throw her in jail? Consider this and you get some sense of the film’s exquisite Moral Complexity.

 

The film has a beautiful Cinéma vérité feel with exceptional hand-held camera work throughout, and the weaving in the rules of the Old Religion and especially the songs into to narrative in a way successfully heightening the sense of realism. Script-writer Hardy spent six months poring over tomes such as James George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” (1890) and Victorian collections of traditional English songs. The songs were then rewritten by Shaffer's brother Peter and Peter’s boyfriend Paul Giovanni, preserving the feel of the folk-music, but better intertwining them into the action of the story. There is a dialogue-less scene of Willow attempting to seduce Neil even though they are in different rooms while a song overpays the strange actions, it is easily one of the film’s most memorable moments.

 

This film had a notoriously tough time of it. Its initial champion, Producer Peter Snell, was removed from his job at British Lion Film Corporation before the film was ready for release. After Snell’s departure, it became clear that Michael Deeley, who ran the studio, actively hated the movie, telling Director Hardy, “‘The Wicker Man’ was one of the worst films ever made and un-releasable.” He demanded it be cut from either 100 (or maybe 112 minutes, depending on who you read) to 84 minutes so it could be distributed and the bottom half of a double-feature.

 

Some luck was with the film, the cuts were done with respect and sensitivity, so some Character development regarding both Neil and Sumerilse was sadly lost, as well as one or more of the beautiful pseudo-folk-songs, but nothing truly essential. Also, in the double-bill it was paired with Nicholas Roeg's “Don't Look Now,” which suited it well. (That year also saw other ground-breaking and highly original Horror and Crime films like “The Exorcist” and “Straw Dogs,” what an extraordinary moment in Genre cinema it was!) The American release (the one I saw) was somewhat more complete and the Critical reaction in the USA was tremendous.

 

Actor Lee and American Distributor Roger Corman (who also was a prolific horror-film Director) campaigned long and hard for a more complete cut be released, but the master negative was lost when it was inadvertently included in a shipment of disposable material (it’s said to be buried beneath the England’s M3 freeway) so the long-awaited full-length version is marred by the fact that the restored minutes were from a degraded print, with the picture and audio are muddy compared to the rest of the movie they were spliced into.

 

“The Wicker Man” existed for decades of the fringes of obscurity, never forgotten but often more talked and written about than actually seen. There was plans for a direct sequel, Written by Schaffer but without Director Hardy’s involvement, introducing the Fantasy elements this film avoided, having the Authority of the State and the arrogance of Christianity invaded the beautiful Island of Sinners, so the Murderous Pagans would be Victimized by Persecutions worse than their own sins; but that never materialized.

 

Later, there were also at least two stage versions. Later still, 2009, there was a remake starring Nicholas Cage of which I can only say I am very sorry I took the time to watch.

 

Finally, in 2011 there was a Thematic sequel, “The Wicker Tree,” Written and Directed by Hardy, which I haven’t seen, but I do love this comment Hardy made in an interview, "The New York Times’s reviewer said it wasn't as gritty as the original ‘Wicker Man,’ but it's a thousand times better than the remake. I was quite happy with that.”

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx1oU1IiZ3k