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...

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 168

The Date: March 16

The Movie: Performance (1970)

What Is It?: Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg make their directorial debut and Mick Jagger makes his acting debut and the results are certainly without precedent: a pop flick that plays more like a Bergman art house flick than an episode of “The Monkees”. Jagger only gets one chance to do his thing, but the “Memo from Turner” sequence is wild enough to sustain an hour and 45 minutes of personality swapping, sleazy sex, and queasy sound effects.

Why Today?: Today is Lips Appreciation Day.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Don’t Look Now'

No one would ever label Nicholas Roeg a genre filmmaker, but he always manages to sneak a bit of horror into his films, whether it’s the nightmarish decadence of Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell), the demented obsessions of Bad Timing, or the shocking, out-of-left-field violence of Eureka. Among the few true horror films Roeg directed (he’d been cinematographer on Roger Corman’s genre masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death) is his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now. Yet as disturbing, violent, and supernatural as the film is, Rogue still isn’t content to play on a single generic field. At heart, Don’t Look Now is a family drama about a couple’s grief following the death of their child. The horrific elements of the film always carry the weight of that grief, making it incredibly sad even when playing with conventional horror elements.

All that being said, the less said about this sad, and surprising film to those who’ve yet to see it the better (I get more into plot in the film’s entry on my 150 Essential Horror Movies list), but rest assured that Don’t Look Now is the most artful and dramatic true horror film of the seventies. So who better to bring it to blu-ray than the Criterion Collection? Based on how above-and-beyond the company has gone with its new blu-ray, I guess the answer is “no one.” The film looks excellent, the new 4k digital restoration respecting its misty aesthetic while delivering the sporadic blasts of red with Technicolor punch. Because of the film’s intentionally soft look, this is not the kind of restoration that will stun viewers, but it is completely correct. 

There are also more than three hours of supplements (only about an hour of which is spent discussing the film’s too-famous-for-its-own-good sex scene). The major new one is “Something Interesting”, a 30-minute assemblage of recent interviews with stars Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, co-screenwriter Allan Scott, and cinematographer Anthony Richmond. No disrespect to the guys behind the camera, but Christie and Sutherland are the ones who really fascinate in this featurette, discussing their very different reservations about making the movie, and Sutherland discussing the terrifying circumstances of the broken-gantry scene and hopefully demystifying that sex scene once and for all with a hilarious recollection of its filming.

There is also a 43-minute conversation with Graeme Clifford, whose editing is as integral to the film’s disorienting brilliance as Roeg’s direction or the stars’ performances. He reveals that he went so far as to alter the script in the cutting room. An 18-minute love letter to Roeg from Steven Soderberg and Danny Boyle is full of insights (particularly from Boyle, who convincingly compares the director to Pablo Picasso and David Lynch) and confessions about which scenes from their own movies they pinched from the master. As for him, Roeg gets his due spotlight in a 47-minute Q&A from 2003 and a 19-minute documentary on Don’t Look Now from Blue Underground’s DVD released the previous year. Unfortunately, Roeg has a tendency to reveal too much about his intentions for his films. I prefer it when filmmakers trust their viewers to decode their work. Another Blue Underground leftover, an interview with Italian pop-singer turned film-score composer Pino Donaggio, rounds out the definitive presentation of one of seventies cinema’s definitive films.