The Wicker Man

[Dave Monroe]

Occult Classic
The thematic daring and genre-bending perversity of
the original Wicker Man
by Graham Fuller
August 29th, 2006 12:38 PM

Whatever the fate of Neil LaBute's Yank remake of  The
Wicker Man—which Warner Bros. is releasing this Friday
(without advance press screenings) —it's unlikely to
generate the enduring passion and rancor inspired by
the 1973 occult classic. Other British films, such as 
Peeping Tom,  The Devils,  Straw Dogs, and  A
Clockwork Orange, steeped in violence and sexual
sadism, have been more controversial;  Get Carter,
lionized by the '90s lad fad, has similarly gained in
retrospective glory. But  The Wicker Man's
genre-bending, thematic daring, and tortuous history
have made it the U.K.'s definitive cult movie. Equally
admired by witchcraft geeks and cineastes, though
critically neglected, it has spawned two books, three
documentaries, websites, and fan conventions.

The film was conceived by the consortium of writer
Anthony Shaffer; producer Peter Snell of British Lion;
and actor Christopher Lee, who wanted to break from
the Hammer films that had typecast him in gothic
horror parts. They bought the rights to David Pinner's
1967 novel Ritual, but chose instead to work on an
original Shaffer script about a sexually repressed
Christian police sergeant from the Scottish mainland
who investigates the disappearance of a schoolgirl in
a remote Hebridean village. Shaffer admitted to being
influenced by Pinner's book, albeit unconsciously,
when the author complained of plagiarism.

First-time director Robin Hardy picked Edward
Woodward, best known for playing a troubled TV spy, to
play Sergeant Howie. Lee took the role of Lord
Summerisle, the island's suave phony magus—auguring
his Saruman in The Lord of the Rings—who exploits the
villagers with his theories on parthenogenesis and
agrarian fecundity. Britt Ekland and Ingrid Pitt
(another Hammer favorite) were cast respectively as
the lubricious barmaid, Willow, and the sexy librarian
who test the sergeant's celibacy; the third blonde in
this contemporary spin on Macbeth's witches is Diane
Cilento's teacher, who outrages Howie by instructing
her adolescent female pupils in phallic symbolism. The
naked Willow's primal mating dance, in which she
smacks impatiently at Howie's bedroom wall, is still a
shocker; only production stills survive of Pitt's nude
scene.

Misled by the villagers, who have abandoned
Christianity for pagan fertility rites involving the
human sacrifice of virgins, Howie proceeds through an
increasingly dreamy labyrinth of temptations, traps,
and cul-de-sacs, only to realize he is the prey. He is
encaged in a Brobdingnagian wicker-work effigy that
the villagers burn as a Beltane offering to the Celtic
sun god. The film's perverse merriness, underscored by
Harry Waxman's floaty handheld camerawork and Paul
Giovanni's airy folk songs, gives way to last-minute
dread as the screen fills with stately images of the
blazing colossus backlit by a tangerine sunset.

Shaffer was designated the film's auteur. Drawing on
James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, he made it a
repository of Celtic and druidic folklore and an
evenhanded dialectical allegory of the culture war
between free love and establishmentarian
censoriousness. Whether or not he had read John
Buchan's Witch Wood, The Wicker Man is redolent of
that haunting novel's story of a young Presbyterian
minister who stumbles on a witch's coven in
17th-century Scotland—especially in the nocturnal orgy
Howie spies on the village green.

It was Hardy, however, who endowed the picture with
cunning visual touches. During the locals' ribald song
about Willow that appalls Howie in the Green Man pub,
the bearded mythological figure depicted on the
tavern's sign materializes as the most bellicose of
the revelers. Served dinner by Willow in a back room,
Howie's sarcastic remark, "Broad beans in their
natural state aren't normally turquoise, are they?"
gains context from Willow's low-cut turquoise top.
Lord Summerisle identifies himself with the sun god
when he shows up in a bright yellow sweater with his
hair teased into a leonine mane. A strip of umbilical
cord hanging from a gravestone and a woman suckling
her baby nearby strike a more visceral note.

Filmed in various Scottish locations, The Wicker Man
fell foul of executives at EMI, which had absorbed
British Lion. According to Steve Phillips's website
(steve-p.org), the studio's 99-minute cut omitted 20
minutes of significant material, enraging Lee. Further
cut to 87 minutes, it was dumped into drive-in
theaters in the U.S. and onto a double bill with Don't
Look Now in the U.K., though Lee's promotional work
secured it a proper West End release. Despite the
destruction of the raw footage, Hardy eventually
pieced together a 95-minute cut that was released
successfully in 1979. A print partially struck from
the long version owned by Roger Corman has been shown
on TV and released on DVD.

Hardy and Lee remain incensed about the cuts—though
they didn't bother Pitt—and are irked by LaBute's
remake. Hardy hopes to adapt the movie into a stage
musical, and he's currently planning a film of his
like-minded novel, Cowboys for Christ, about two young
Texan virgins, a gospel singer and her boyfriend, who
go a-preachin' in Scotland. Vanessa Redgrave has
signed on and Hardy wants LeAnn Rimes to play the
girl. Call it Stand by Your Wicker Man.

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0635,fuller,74317,20.html

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