The Wicker Man

[David Casseres]

I remember seeing that when it came out.  It's very high on my list of
So Bad It's Good movies, along with The Valley Obscured By Clouds.

On 9/1/06, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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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