Director: Robin Hardy (UK). Year of Release: 1973
The last Sunday of April, an austere chapel. We see a prim man wearing a sensible suit and a Frank Lampard haircut singing along to The Lord is My Shepherd. He then gives a Communion reading. It’s not long before he’s flying a police plane over barren land before landing in the water near an island harbour. We are going to see most of the film through the eyes of Sergeant Neil Howie, but he is so solemn and pompous that we never even consider identifying with him.
Howie calls over to the gaggle of men at the edge of the harbour, asking them to send him a dinghy. At first they prevaricate, saying that he’s on private property and he’ll have to ask permission from Lord Summerisle. When he finally reaches land, the men maintain their distance. In the top floor of the houses which line the harbourside, inquisitive faces peek out to look at what is happening, and then just as quickly pull back into the shadows.
Howie shows the fishermen a photo of a schoolgirl, and says that she’s called Rowan Morrison. Someone has sent a letter to the police station on the mainland addressed personally to Howie. According to the letter, Rowan is missing, and possibly dead. No-one on the island appears to recognise the picture, nor do they recognise the name. Eventually one of them points the way towards the local post office, run by a Mrs. Morrison.
Watching The Wicker Man for the umpteenth time, you’re struck how weird it must have seemed in cinemas 50 years ago. In fact, it’s still pretty weird now. Although Midsommar obviously stole some of its look, it has a structure unlike any other film I can think of. Dialogue is broken up by people breaking into song, such as when the bar owner tells his daughter Willow to show Howie his room, and the whole bar breaks into a song about how easy barmen’s daughters are.
What is incredible is not that the film does this – you can add any old shit if you’re audacious enough – but that it somehow works. The soundtrack is full of olde worlde folks songs, which are often about fucking and remind us that we’re not in Kansas any more. We are constantly unnerved, convinced that Summerisle somehow exists, but that it is an anachronism which should not be there. Having said that, whatever the alternative is, it’s certainly not Howie’s puritanism.
Howie goes out for a walk and the park is full of copulating couples. When he goes to bed, he hears a commotion outside. It’s Lord Summerisle bringing one of the local boys to Willow. Howie, who is in the neighbouring room, struggles to sleep. He has a similar problem the next night when Willow is alone but still writhes naked on the other side of the wall. Later, when Howie visits the local school, he hears the teacher explaining to her class the role of maypoles as phallic symbols.
A contrast is built between Howie’s Calvinism – he has a fiancée, but does not believe in sex before marriage. He only drinks in moderation, and it’s a bit of a shock that he drinks at all. On the other side of the fence, the more pagan villagers take orders from the Lord, and see the future of their crops as being determined by whims of the God of fruitfulness. Both points of view are bizarre but dogmatically held, leaving little room for doubt.
The fact that Howie is not on home soil puts him at a disadvantage. He can swear in the name of all things holy that the villagers are heathens, but it is he who is the exception. Caught up in a world where sexuality and parades in animal costume play a much larger role than his comfort zone allows, he gradually loses authority. He starts the film using his police badge to order everyone around, but gradually realises that this counts for little here.
The Wicker Man is a film of its times – when the counter culture started to fall apart. It is more an Altamont film than a Woodstock one. Following the re-election of Richard Nixon the year before, by 1973 young hippies had lost the confidence that peace and love would automatically change the world. At the same time, the Vietnam war was spluttering to a halt, and the UK was on the verge of a miners’ strike bringing down a Tory government. Change was still in the air.
Howie is, then, Mr Jones in Dylan’s Ballad Of a Thin Man, who knows something is happening but don’t know what it is. He represents the old order which is no longer able to rule, but whose successor has not yet defined itself. The Wicker Man was part of a new sort of police drama, where the cops were no longer the good guys. All that there was to offer in its wake is chaos – and this is a film that revels in chaos.
It is interesting that the opening credits list the film as “Anthony Schaffer’s The Wicker Man”. Not Robin Hardy, directing his first film, but screenwriter Schaffer. At the time, Schaffer was a hot property in the wake of the previous year’s Sleuth – on of the few stage plays which (thanks to superb performances by Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine) worked just as well as a film. The Wicker Man has less complicated dialogue than Sleuth, but is just as tightly written.
And, with few equals (I can only think of Planet of the Apes off the top of my head), The Wicker Man has one of the most powerful and memorable reveal endings in cinema. It doesn’t matter how well you know the film, however much you’ve been spending the previous 90 minutes working up to That Scene. When it finally comes it hits you every time. I would love to watch the Wicker Man for the first time, but it’s so good that despite repeated viewings it still delivers.
CinePhil 