Review: 'The Wicker Man: The Official Story of the Film'

Like most true cult films, The Wicker Man has certain trappings of a particular genre (horror), but it's actually pretty hard to categorize. For most of its run time, it would be better classified as a police procedural or mystery. Midway through production, director Robin Hardy declared it was a musical. Indeed, The Wicker Man is all these things, which is just one reason it is such a unique viewing experience. However, it can also be frustrating since it exists in so many forms due to a less than respectful release that saw it get chopped to pieces to play second-fiddle to Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now, with which it joined forces for an admittedly excellent double feature in 1973. Complicating the story further, there are questions as to how much it was influenced by David Pinner's novel Ritual, how much it was auteured by Hardy (whom many of the folks involved in the film describe as barely competent), and how miserable the cold, combative, and stressfully compressed shoot was.

Indeed, making The Wicker Man doesn't seem like it was that much fun for the people who made The Wicker Man, but that also makes the story of its making juicy with drama. That's a boon for writer John Walsh and his new book, The Wicker Man: The Official Story of the Film. He gets into the film's literary genesis, the historical accuracy of its pagan depictions, its music, and its troubled making, so full of animosity (Britt Ekland vs. Ingrid Pitt; Christopher Lee vs. Michael Deeley; Robin Hardy vs. everyone). He makes attempts to solve myths associated with the film, such as the notion that Deeley deliberately botched the film's release and that Rod Stewart made an attempt to buy every print of the film because he didn't approve of girlfriend Ekland showing so much skin in the flick, although there's so much bad blood and opportunities to be self-serving among the Wicker Man gang that the reliability of the sources may sometimes be questionable. 

But who cares? What matters is that the telling is delicious and the book is full of fascinating tidbits (I hadn't known that Christopher Lee held some sway over the script's rewrites) and images that include shots of the construction of the title man, original sheet music for its wonderful songs, actors in the studio recording those songs, some fabulous fan art, stills of deleted scenes that have not been included in any cut of the film, and a handy chart for differentiating the film's various edits. Now if only the longest and best edit could somehow get properly restored...