[This is the first of occasional reviews of old movies that I’ll do, to take a break from the heavy breathing of such other stuff as you see on this blog. Such reviews will vary in length and editorial quality, but are all placed here to stir thought among the young about what makes older movies of value, not least among quirkier movies.]
There are two ways to look at how you might anticipate enjoying, or putting into perspective, this movie.
A personal angle (pardon me)
One is a sort of parochial way (which I describe not as the most orthodox of Christians). Say you, like me, look at Easter as the more profound of the most major Christian holidays. Christmas seems to have its profundity, sure, but Easter is really about what in the life story of Christ contains the most meaning. After all, if you read the Passion sections of the Gospels, you might agree this conveys far more about Christ than the birth in Bethlehem, the Three Wise Men, etc.
If you grant this point a minute, then what might you, like me, object to about how Easter is celebrated? To be sure, celebration of both Christmas and Easter is encrusted with pagan traditions and usages. Christmas has the tree, Santa, the elves, mistletoe—all tshotshkes [sp?] that are not mentioned in the Bible at all and that, of course, have their provenance in European pagan, or pre-Christian, rituals or beliefs.
But in my adult years, I find the pagan traditions still encrusted on Easter celebration to be more offensive. Christmas has long been a more polyglot, gone-to-excess holiday: it’s the end of the year, balance sheets are being totaled, the boss leaves special candy and other treats in the office kitchen, tacky music rubs you the wrong way at supermarkets, and decorations litter the malls: there’s always something like a vastly overdone, rather tasteless wedding about the American celebration of Christmas, and somehow we live with it (or at least suffer through it).
But Easter comes after often-tough winter, and bright growth of plants and flowers has started. It seems like a holiday where the events and décor can, or should, always be more focused and sensibly “on message."
But what do we find, which may turn us off in connection with the holiday after we have stopped being kids? Easter eggs. Chocolate bunnies. More gauche to me, Easter-egg trees (whose idea was that?). I don’t like it.
What movie can help us parse the pagan usages from the truly Christian side of Easter, to help us maybe disaffiliate ourselves from the pagan stuff forever, when it comes to appreciate of and celebration of Easter? (Not that this is why the movie was made.)
This may seem like a weird way to judge what a movie is about. But it does provide one way that this movie may seem relevant and “culturally salutary” despite what might strike modern audiences as its many offbeat, or quaint, or just weird features.
Exoticism by many people’s standards—but so hard to swallow?
But now check out this next way of assessing a movie, in terms of what might strike the average middle-class American moviegoer of today, especially the sniggering young.
Suppose a movie starts with a plane making a trip over rugged Scottish coastline, and the music starts as the one-chord, drone-appropriate type we associate with bagpipes, but this is played alienatingly on a synthesizer, and a female Scottish voice intones some age-old folksong. Then this “pious” Celtic “recital” segues rather abruptly, like a sudden gust of liberating warm wind, into a more modern folk-like music, finger-picking on an acoustic guitar with smooth male voice, which reminds us of the acoustic side of the rock group Jethro Tull, while visually we’re flying over a more lush, rich-crops-laden area (again, supposed to be on an island in chilly Scotland).
The movie then takes us into a weird investigation into a missing girl, the complaint about which came from this isolated island, conducted by a sincerely righteous fellow (if a martinet and a prig) of a Scottish police officer, played by the agreeable British actor Edward Woodward. He starts his probe right off a seaplane, among elderly Scottish men at a dock, some of whom sport the world’s worst teeth (not a point the movie meant to make, I think).
Later, as the police sergeant makes his way amid the infrastructure and somewhat inscrutable citizens of this cult-like society, we see the young actress Britt Ekland, playing a sexually licentious “landlord’s daughter,” singing a sort of mildly melancholy serenade while topless. And throughout the movie, we witness a host of pagan usages and icons turning up in increasingly unsettling fashion.
We are watching The Wicker Man, the 1973 version produced, anomalously, by the Hammer company, the British maker of horror films that not infrequently starred Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt, who both indeed turn up in this movie. Here, Lee sports longish hair, urbane manner, and now-ugly ’70s duds. (The reconstituted Hammer company was, by January 31 this year, covered in a New York Times Sunday edition. Meanwhile, Lee, in his eighties, had a role in the recently released American film Hugo.)
The descriptions I’ve made of a singing, bare-chested Ekland, etc., do not mean you are having a bad dream: this is a sort of horror movie of values, and I recommend it not only for its atmosphere, which might strike today’s young viewers as quaintly dated, but for the simple intellectual idea that it articulates as its main theme.
A film that almost disappeared, today alive and accessible, with relevance
This was a film whose distribution in the U.S., because of its non-general-audience aim, was considered by (let’s not underestimate him) Roger Corman, the low-budget indie-film director and producer. Corman later saved the day by possessing the only print of the long version that Wicker Man restorers needed after the original negatives had all been bizarrely discarded as fill for a highway project years before. If you can find a DVD of this movie, check out the “extra” documentary that details the fraught production, distribution, and afterlife of this movie (which includes a genteel set of comments by Mr. Corman, among many others)—putting this movie in a league with Apocalypse Now in terms of its colorful behind-the-scenes saga.
I’ve only seen the shorter version of The Wicker Man, which true fans lament as not the right one to view (indeed, in the short, initial-release version, the editing--demanded by producers who took over its finishing amid a change in company ownership in 1973--seems occasionally choppy within the first 25 minutes or so). But in either version, I think you would enjoy it if you wanted something different, and maybe memorable for its exoticism (both esthetic and thematic).
And not that it’s simply didactic, nor need you be concerned with any lesson about Christianity per se, when it comes to deciding on seeing it. Also, despite all I’ve revealed, there’s still a final emotional punch it packs that I’m not spoiling for you. Not that all art need have a social purpose, but this film helps you put into perspective not only, incidentally, what is pagan amid the springtime rituals of our celebration of Easter. But its own aim appears to be to ask, what makes a religion truly genuine: for instance, does it include trickery and murder?
This turns out to be a modern concern, for reasons I needn’t belabor.
