The WIcker Man (1973)
5 July 2025 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI do not recommend playing a concert on 3 hours' sleep (and a twelve-mile cycle ride following a similar one returning at 11pm the night before).
I got through it, but it was a bit unfair on the rest of my section -- of which I'm supposed to be the leader! The effects are of course similar to drunk driving; habit gets you through the actual notes and dynamics, but reaction speed and concentration are affected. I kept losing my place in the complex/repeated passages, which is pretty much my job to keep...
I had been to see 'The Final [restored] Cut" of "The Wicker Man", although it is still apparently missing 7 minutes or about 50% of the shortened material. https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-wicker-man-the-cut-may-be-final-but-the-film-is-still-incomplete I had just been reading Christopher Lee ("Tall, Dark and Gruesome"), who talks about all the little character parts having been cut, the butcher, the chemist etc., while the archive video introduction warned us that the crucial scene establishing that the protagonist 'had never known a woman' was missing and needed to be inferred in order to understand the plot. I could well imagine that a significant proportion of the film's intended charm might have lain in the background detail (as with the abridged translation of "The Phantom of the Opera"), so this seemed like a good opportunity to see it.
"The Wicker Man", like "The Sixth Sense", is one of those films that I have never bothered seeing because the big twist had already been thoroughly 'spoiled' for me, and I have to say that in terms of horror it would certainly have been a lot more effective if I had gone in, as was presumably intended, under the assumption that this was going to be a detective/rescue mission where our protagonist overcomes the deliberate obfuscation of the locals ("As May Day festivities intensify and the islanders' behaviour becomes more frenzied, Howie's quest to save the girl becomes a race against time... ") However it was just as well that I did already know the outcome, since it was quite comprehensively revealed by the guest speaker giving the intro talk (to cries of "Spoilers!" from the audience, many of whom were presumably enthusiasts bringing along the uninitiated ; the man in front of me actually tried to get his teenage daughters to put their hands over their ears, but it was a bit late by that point).
What I *didn't* have any idea of in advance was that the original X (later video 18) rating covered not just the horror elements but also extensive female nudity (including lengthy scenes of a naked Britt Ekland, 'dubbed into Scottish' as the intro put it!) and obscene songs -- ironically the one scene where nudity is complained about by the characters onscreen is the one where the actual performers are obviously wearing body stockings, presumably because you weren't allowed to show schoolgirls jumping naked over a bonfire :-p
It's certainly a weird and memorably unsettling film, and interesting in that, again as mentioned by the intro speaker, it is a very rare example, at least in Britain, of a film where the main protagonist is presented as being an active Christian rather than, say, someone who happens to go conventionally to church on Sundays or who is a vicar by profession but without beliefs really entering into it. Setting it in Scotland probably helps make that more convincing, since this was always the standout area for Covenanters, Sabbatarians and other militant belief...
The girls in the row behind me were busy remarking afterwards how handsome Christopher Lee was; he *was*, but like Margarita Terekhova, not in that film and with that hair :-p We do get to hear him sing, however, in a few snatches of rich operatic bass. And as the affable Lord Summerisle (and then in his deathly serious man-dressed-as-woman role as pagan priest) he is convincingly unhinged, at first enjoyably in command of the situation and then clearly dangerous. The big question of the film is whether the harvest *will* succeed next year -- because, as the Sergeant says, the ultimate expedient will be that 'the King must die'; he himself will be expected to make the sacrifice, and he may or may not take this invented religion of his that seriously. His people very well might...
(Christopher Lee claims in his autobiography that he was not actually paid anything for his performance in this role, and neither was the scriptwriter!)
I got through it, but it was a bit unfair on the rest of my section -- of which I'm supposed to be the leader! The effects are of course similar to drunk driving; habit gets you through the actual notes and dynamics, but reaction speed and concentration are affected. I kept losing my place in the complex/repeated passages, which is pretty much my job to keep...
I had been to see 'The Final [restored] Cut" of "The Wicker Man", although it is still apparently missing 7 minutes or about 50% of the shortened material. https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-wicker-man-the-cut-may-be-final-but-the-film-is-still-incomplete I had just been reading Christopher Lee ("Tall, Dark and Gruesome"), who talks about all the little character parts having been cut, the butcher, the chemist etc., while the archive video introduction warned us that the crucial scene establishing that the protagonist 'had never known a woman' was missing and needed to be inferred in order to understand the plot. I could well imagine that a significant proportion of the film's intended charm might have lain in the background detail (as with the abridged translation of "The Phantom of the Opera"), so this seemed like a good opportunity to see it.
"The Wicker Man", like "The Sixth Sense", is one of those films that I have never bothered seeing because the big twist had already been thoroughly 'spoiled' for me, and I have to say that in terms of horror it would certainly have been a lot more effective if I had gone in, as was presumably intended, under the assumption that this was going to be a detective/rescue mission where our protagonist overcomes the deliberate obfuscation of the locals ("As May Day festivities intensify and the islanders' behaviour becomes more frenzied, Howie's quest to save the girl becomes a race against time... ") However it was just as well that I did already know the outcome, since it was quite comprehensively revealed by the guest speaker giving the intro talk (to cries of "Spoilers!" from the audience, many of whom were presumably enthusiasts bringing along the uninitiated ; the man in front of me actually tried to get his teenage daughters to put their hands over their ears, but it was a bit late by that point).
What I *didn't* have any idea of in advance was that the original X (later video 18) rating covered not just the horror elements but also extensive female nudity (including lengthy scenes of a naked Britt Ekland, 'dubbed into Scottish' as the intro put it!) and obscene songs -- ironically the one scene where nudity is complained about by the characters onscreen is the one where the actual performers are obviously wearing body stockings, presumably because you weren't allowed to show schoolgirls jumping naked over a bonfire :-p
It's certainly a weird and memorably unsettling film, and interesting in that, again as mentioned by the intro speaker, it is a very rare example, at least in Britain, of a film where the main protagonist is presented as being an active Christian rather than, say, someone who happens to go conventionally to church on Sundays or who is a vicar by profession but without beliefs really entering into it. Setting it in Scotland probably helps make that more convincing, since this was always the standout area for Covenanters, Sabbatarians and other militant belief...
The girls in the row behind me were busy remarking afterwards how handsome Christopher Lee was; he *was*, but like Margarita Terekhova, not in that film and with that hair :-p We do get to hear him sing, however, in a few snatches of rich operatic bass. And as the affable Lord Summerisle (and then in his deathly serious man-dressed-as-woman role as pagan priest) he is convincingly unhinged, at first enjoyably in command of the situation and then clearly dangerous. The big question of the film is whether the harvest *will* succeed next year -- because, as the Sergeant says, the ultimate expedient will be that 'the King must die'; he himself will be expected to make the sacrifice, and he may or may not take this invented religion of his that seriously. His people very well might...
(Christopher Lee claims in his autobiography that he was not actually paid anything for his performance in this role, and neither was the scriptwriter!)