Robin Hardy (1973)
British Lion Films was in big financial trouble at the time it made The Wicker Man. The studio was soon afterwards bought by EMI and several scenes had been cut from Robin Hardy’s film by the time it went on general release, as a supporting feature to Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. That was how I first saw them both, at the York Odeon in early 1974, when I was eighteen. I was quite taken with The Wicker Man, felt Roeg’s psychological thriller wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and didn’t like to admit either of those things. Half a century on, Don’t Look Now is still overrated, hovering on the fringes of the top hundred in Sight & Sound’s latest decennial greatest-films poll, but its fiftieth anniversary isn’t being marked like The Wicker Man’s. Last month saw not just its return to cinemas, after restoration and re-mastering, but also a live performance at the Barbican Centre of ‘Musics [sic] from Summerisle’ to celebrate the film’s half-century. Robin Hardy died in 2016 but his sons are now developing a documentary (working title ‘Wickermania!’) about the evolution of their father’s ‘folk horror’ story into a cult classic. The Wicker Man, too, has come to be overrated. In 2004 Total Film reckoned it the sixth-greatest British film of all time; it placed fourth in the Guardian’s 2010 list of best-ever horror films internationally. Returning to it forty-nine years on, I still like the picture, though. The Wicker Man is a discombobulating mixture of naff and powerful.
In late April 1973, Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) pilots a police seaplane from the Scottish mainland to the remote (fictional) Hebridean island of Summerisle. He’s responding to an anonymous letter, addressed to him by name at his police station, which reports a missing person – Rowan Morrison, a Summerisle teenager – and encloses her photograph. Howie isn’t even on dry land before he’s confronted by the locals’ distinctive insularity. The harbour master (Russell Waters) politely explains that the police sergeant needs the permission of the community’s head honcho, Lord Summerisle, to come ashore; Howie, rather less politely, begs to differ and gets his way. When Howie shows Rowan’s photo to the locals, no one recognises her – not even May Morrison (Irene Sunters), who, according to the anonymous letter, is Rowan’s mother, and who has a significant forename. On a wall of the Green Man inn where Howie books bed and board is a row of framed photographs, showing the year-by-year succession of May Queens at the island’s May Day festival. The photograph for 1972 is conspicuously missing: the weird, unwelcoming landlord, Alder MacGregor (Lindsay Kemp), tells Howie the picture frame was broken. At the local school next morning, the teacher, Miss Rose (Diane Cilento), and her pupils deny all knowledge of the missing girl until Howie finds Rowan Morrison’s name in the register. From this point, the people of Summerisle change their tune and acknowledge that Rowan is dead. Howie is soon convinced this is another lie. Miss Rose directs him to the churchyard where the girl’s grave can be found. Rowan’s coffin, when opened, contains only the carcass of a hare.
Howie, as well as thwarted professionally, is offended morally by his early experiences on the island. He’s a proud practising Christian: a prologue to the film sees him in a church congregation beside a young woman (Alison Hughes) who, we later learn, is his fiancée. He sings ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ enthusiastically before reading from the Bible and taking communion. The last two are conflated in what seems like poetic licence designed to stress his piety: it’s Howie, rather than the priest taking communion, who speaks Christ’s words to the disciples at the Last Supper (‘This do in remembrance of me’, etc). Summerisle, however, is a pagan and decidedly carnal society. The men drinking in the Green Man sing a ribald song, ‘The Landlord’s Daughter’; the actual landlord’s daughter, Willow MacGregor (Britt Ekland), delights them as she joins in, vindicating the lyrics and their leers. Willow is also blatantly flirty with Howie from the moment she serves him his lousy evening meal. (He’s revolted by the tinned vegetables and fruit – puzzled, too, since the island is known for its orchards and apple crops.) On his first night at the inn, he’s distracted by the sound of banging, in more ways than one, coming through the wall of Willow’s adjoining room. Miss Rose drills her pupils in the origins of the May Day rituals they’ll be celebrating the following day, including the phallic symbolism of the maypole. Howie sternly reprimands her. When he eventually pays a call on Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), Howie looks out of a window to see young women dancing nude. That night, Willow does the same on the other side of his bedroom wall. Her rhythmic thuds on the wall and Howie’s own imagination torment him.
The screenplay, written by Anthony Shaffer, was inspired by David Pinner’s novel Ritual, published in 1967. The Wicker Man‘s opposition of Christianity and paganism, though very different from the roguish stage comedy-thrillers for which Shaffer became best known, is strongly reminiscent of his twin brother’s favoured form of theatrical contest – in which directive, rational intelligence tries and fails to get the better of unbridled, subversive genius. Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun was first staged in the 1960s; Equus opened at the National Theatre in the same year The Wicker Man was made; Amadeus followed six years later. Sergeant Howie’s unequal struggle also brings to mind the plight of another would-be controlling outsider whose sexual inexperience proves an Achilles heel in their new environment: Miss Giddens, the governess in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961).
The latter is certainly superior to The Wicker Man but Robin Hardy’s film, like The Innocents, does well as a piece of storytelling. Hardy and Anthony Shaffer understand the dramatic benefits of building things gradually. That may not sound remarkable but it has become unfashionable. Highly-rated horror shows of recent years such as Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Natalie Erika James’s Relic (2020) do next to nothing to lull or deceive the audience in their early stages. In The Wicker Man, by contrast, the seed of human sacrifice is planted in the prologue – the shot of Howie taking communion, as his voiceover speaks of the blood and body of Christ – but the film-makers are patient in letting the seed grow. Sinister details are there from an early stage: the look of the confectionery on sale in the post office; the frog that May Morrison pops in and out of the mouth of her younger daughter, Myrtle (Jennifer Martin), as a sore throat remedy. (The two details are combined when her mother rewards Myrtle with a sweet ‘for being a brave girl’.) But these details are amusing as much as creepy and the islanders’ reticence that frustrates pompous Neil Howie is, at first, humorous – it’s reminiscent of the travails of Basil Radford’s Home Guard captain, up against wily, cussed locals on a different Hebridean island, in Alexander Mackendrick’s Whisky Galore! (1949).
It must be said that the film generates some of its humour inadvertently. The starkers dance troupe that scandalises Howie is evidently wearing bodystockings. Elsewhere, Robin Hardy is ludicrously determined to show naked female flesh even when there’s no connection with time-honoured ritual: on May Day morning, Howie, conducting a desperate house-to-house search for Rowan, opens a door in the home of the village librarian (Ingrid Pitt) to find her taking a bath (he’s far more disturbed by this, of course, than she is). This approach tends to place The Wicker Man in the company of contemporary British film sex comedies rather than in the canon of horror classics. The casting of the chief supporting roles, although it reinforces the bizarreness of proceedings, also has its daft side. According to Vic Pratt’s piece in Sight & Sound (October 2013) on the film’s fortieth anniversary, Christopher Lee declared that ‘he gave his greatest performance’ in The Wicker Man. Lee played an important part in getting the film made but, in front of the camera, he cuts a laughable figure. In his check suit, yellow polo neck sweater and carefully coiffed wig, Lord Summerisle has the look not of a man steeped in ancient tradition but of someone who got rich quick in the 1960s and decided to buy himself a Scottish island. Lee’s self-regard as an ack-taw makes matters worse: his sonorous delivery adds to the phoniness of this dilettante pagan.
Hardy’s international line-up of actresses enjoy different levels of success in managing a Scottish accent: if Britt Ekland fares better than Diane Cilento it’s only because the former voice was actually dubbed by Annie Ross. All in all, it seems Ekland benefited from plenty of assistance: Wikipedia reports that two body doubles contributed to her naked dance solo. The choices to play queasy menfolk on Summerisle range from predictable (Aubrey Morris doing his usual thing, as a grinning gravedigger) to bewildering – in the person of Lindsay Kemp. He’s genuinely funny as camp, lavishly seedy MacGregor but you keep wondering when Kemp will get a chance to dance. As the events of May Day approach their climax, Howie knocks the landlord out, steals his costume for the parade and leaves MacGregor tied to his bed. So Lindsay Kemp ends up just about the only performer not on the move.
While some bigger names on the screen dissipate the story’s tension, the look of Hardy’s lesser-known actors and/or extras playing the islanders is something else. A few, like the well-named Oak (Ian Campbell), are brutishly menacing. Others are lank and pasty enough to get you believing in a crucial part of the plot – that last year’s Summerisle harvest failed and urgent action is needed to compensate in 1973. Howie learns from Lord Summerisle how his grandfather – ‘A distinguished Victorian scientist, agronomist, free thinker’ – acquired and transformed the fortunes of the island. He developed particular strains of fruit that would flourish in the local climate and encouraged the revival of pagan worship: the natives came to see their bountiful harvests as inextricably linked to their worship. Visiting the library, Howie consults an impressively large book and reads aloud from it:
‘Primitive man lived and died by his harvest. The purpose of his spring ceremonies was to ensure a plentiful autumn. Relics of these fertility dramas are to be found all over Europe. In Great Britain, for example, one can still see harmless versions of them danced in obscure villages on May Day. Their cast includes many alarming characters: a man-animal, or hobbyhorse, who canters at the head of the procession charging at the girls; a man-woman, the sinister teaser, played by the community leader or priest; and a man-fool, Punch, most complex of all the symbolic figures – the privileged simpleton and king for a day … They were frenzied rites ending in a sacrifice …’
This text (of which Howie reads plenty more) sounds authentic enough, at least to lay ears, which include mine. Vic Pratt’s S&S piece notes that better informed viewers have taken a dim view of the film’s interpretation of J G Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy aren’t too scrupulous about implications of Howie’s religious commitment that might impede the narrative. The film is specific that the church service at the start is taking place on Sunday 29th April 1973. Summerisle’s May Day festival is obviously two days later and Howie spends two nights on the island. Would this formidably devout Christian get up from his pew and straight into his seaplane on the Sabbath? (And it can’t be that he received the anonymous letter, posted from Summerisle, on that Sunday morning.) It would be no surprise if the film-makers had a selective approach to accuracy in the much larger chunk of folk-custom ritual that The Wicker Man describes. In any case, though, Howie’s reading in the library is doubly effective as a dramatic device. It informs him what will happen on the May Day parade. It forewarns Howie, though to no avail, what will eventually happen to him.
Wikipedia notes that pre-release cuts to the film included, to Christopher Lee’s chagrin, material from Lord Summerisle’s first meeting with Howie. Most of this has presumably since been reinstated (the 2023 version runs 95 minutes, compared with the 87 minutes of the original release) but the EMI butchers weren’t wholly wrong: Lord Summerisle’s history lecture is the one point at which there’s a loss of momentum. Otherwise, The Wicker Man compels attention throughout. (That makes it very different from a latter-day film that it surely influenced, Ari Aster’s longueur-ridden Midsommar (2019).) Robin Hardy, himself a former art director, wasn’t working with a large budget – which seems to have made for greater creativity in some respects. The islanders’ May Day masks look both homemade and convincingly grotesque. This is especially true of MacGregor’s Punch head which, along with his costume, becomes Howie’s disguise on the parade.
After finding the missing May Queen photograph, which shows Rowan standing among empty crates, Howie realises the previous year’s harvest failed. He learns from the library tome that a human sacrifice is offered to the gods in the event of crop failure. He’s sure Rowan is alive and about to be sacrificed. Mayday, mayday … Planning to enlist the help of police colleagues on the mainland, Howie tries to leave Summerisle but the seaplane won’t start and his frantic solo attempts to save Rowan begin. When she appears, apparently as the islanders’ captive, Howie sets her free and they escape together into a hillside cave. Emerging from it, they come face to face with Lord Summerisle et al. ‘Did I do it right?’ asks Rowan (Geraldine Cowper). His lordship assures her she ‘did it beautifully’.
What’s liable to be underrated in The Wicker Man is the excellence of Edward Woodward. He imbues Howie with a rather ridiculous rectitude – evident not just in what he says but in his forthright gait. Woodward complements the policeman’s usual self-righteous manner with an almost endearing sheepishness: Howie has a habit of asserting so robustly that he seems to startle even himself and retreats into semi-retraction. He’s staunchly opposed to sex before marriage; his maturity (Woodward was in his early forties at the time) gives Howie’s virginity an extra edge. Sexually aroused by Willow in the room next door, he’s in real agony. This sequence epitomises the film’s split personality: Willow’s routine is silly albeit striking; Howie’s lead-us-not-into-temptation anguish is real. Edward Woodward is very securely in character: when Willow, Miss Rose and the librarian strip Howie of his Punch costume, then his police uniform, and anoint his chest in readiness for sacrifice, his face expresses, as well as great fear, shame that the women have finally breached his defences.
Inside the gigantic wicker man in which he’ll burn to death, Howie reprises ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ with passionate defiance. The increasingly steep decline of Christianity in Western Europe in the half-century since The Wicker Man was made might seem to threaten the film’s impact – for many, Howie’s beliefs will now be as arcane as the ‘old’ religion the story pits him against – but the duel is still a potent one. And, at least until his climactic vanquishing, some part of your brain clings to the hope that you’re watching a police procedural rather than a horror movie – that the forces of law and order might prevail. When Lord Summerisle tells Howie that the islanders ‘found you and brought you here and controlled your every thought and action since you arrived’, the audience must acknowledge that we too have been tricked. (Although Hardy cheats a bit with this. For example, if the whole community was in on the cunning plan, why does Alder MacGregor, imprisoned in his bedroom, look dumbfounded by what’s happened to him? It’s not as if Howie is still there for MacGregor to pretend to.) The ‘Musics from Summerisle’ are deservedly plural. As well as traditional pieces – like ‘Summer Is Icumen In’, with which the islanders celebrate their concluding victory – there are numerous original pieces written for The Wicker Man by Paul Giovanni: at times, we seem to be watching a folk horror musical. The famous construction that gives the film its name emerges only in the last few minutes: it’s the culminating illustration of Robin Hardy’s patience in playing his strongest cards. The final images, in which the wicker man’s flaming head falls and DP Harry Waxman’s camera moves from the hillside to an ardent setting sun, are terrific.
4 July 2023
