PhilPaine.com

I hear (with a shud­der of hor­ror) that an Amer­i­can remake of this clas­sic British Ham­mer Stu­dios film is in pro­duc­tion. Yet anoth­er insult to a fine film that under­went more than its share of insults. The orig­i­nal was idi­ot­i­cal­ly mar­ket­ed as a shock-hor­ror pic­ture, ensur­ing that the peo­ple who would have appre­ci­at­ed it nev­er saw it and the peo­ple who saw it hat­ed it. Then it was bru­tal­ly re-cut in such a way as to make the film incom­pre­hen­si­ble. That hatch­et-job of a print cir­cu­lat­ed for years, an embar­rass­ment to the direc­tor and the stars who per­formed bril­liant­ly in it. The direc­tor even­tu­al­ly re-acquired the rights to it, and did his best to restore the orig­i­nal cut. I was present when the restored ver­sion was pre­miered in San Fran­cis­co, with the direc­tor in atten­dance. There have been two doc­u­men­taries made about this sad chain of events, nei­ther of which I’ve seen. If you rent the film, or see it on tele­vi­sion, beware of the butchered print, which still circulates.

The plot of The Wick­er Man is unique. A police­man (Edward Wood­ward) in the Scot­tish West High­lands gets a let­ter from a small island in the Hebrides. The island, under the influ­ence of a warm cur­rent, is famous for export­ing apples. The let­ter asserts that an island girl has gone miss­ing. When the police­man arrives on the island to inves­ti­gate, he dis­cov­ers two pecu­liar things: 1) every­one on the island is try­ing to hide some­thing from him, and 2) the islanders have aban­doned Chris­tian­i­ty for a revived form of ancient pagan­ism. We are giv­en, from the begin­ning, a clear pic­ture of the policeman’s char­ac­ter. He is prig­gish, pious­ly reli­gious, and a vir­gin. He is utter­ly shocked by the hap­py-go-lucky lifestyle of the neo-pagan islanders, with their joy­ful sex­u­al­i­ty, bawdy pub songs, and chil­dren danc­ing naked. Much of the back­ground is explained in his inter­changes with the island’s Laird, bril­liant­ly played by Christo­pher Lee, and with the island school­teacher (Diane Cilen­to). The police­man suf­fers the ulti­mate temp­ta­tion to his piety (and vir­gin­i­ty) in the form of the rav­ish­ing­ly beau­ti­ful tavern-keeper’s daugh­ter (Britt Ekland), and is even­tu­al­ly drawn, step-by-step, into a trap that puts him into the Wick­er Man. The trick of the film is to take a per­son that one instant­ly feels con­tempt for, and put him into a sit­u­a­tion where, even­tu­al­ly, you come to respect his view. I will not spoil the sto­ry for those who haven’t seen it. Suf­fice it to say that the tale reca­pit­u­lates what must have hap­pened a thou­sand times in a thou­sand vil­lages of ancient Europe, as Chris­tian­i­ty moved into and dis­placed pagan com­mu­ni­ties. The pagan lore pre­sent­ed in the film is rea­son­ably authen­tic, giv­en the expla­na­tion that it is pre­sent­ed as an arti­fi­cial revival. The celtic music played in the film is wonderful.