The creative core of The Wicker Man (1973)
(Left to right) Peter Snell, Anthony Shaffer, and Robin Hardy |
In 1973, with a minimum of fanfare, a movie produced through British Lion and directed by Robin Hardy snuck briefly onto the cinema screens of the UK. The Wicker Man, a mystery thriller featuring a battle of wills between a fiercely Presbyterian police sergeant and a joyfully pagan aristocrat, had no real precedent.
Filmed entirely on location on several islands in western Scotland, with choppy sequences characteristic of the (then) little used hand-held camera, The Wicker Man at the time must have seemed relentlessly uncommercial.
British Lion, which had gone through a change of ownership, didn't like the film. They had it drastically edited, and despite the presence of several names in the cast --including Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward-- gave it only a very limited release.
Despite encouraging critical reviews, lack of distribution and advertising meant that the movie was soon sidelined into festival oddity.
The plot is set in motion when Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) of the West Highland Constabulary receives an anonymous letter from a resident of "Summerisle" reporting the apparent disappearance of a child, Rowan. Howie flies out alone and finds that the islanders seem to take delight in frustrating his attempts to find out what happened to the missing girl.
Soon he finds "degeneracy . . .brawling in bars, indecency in public places" and becomes incensed with the school where children are taught about the importance of the phallic symbol which, according to Miss Rose (Diane Cilento), the teacher, is "venerated in religions such as ours." Everyone on the island is primed for the oncoming May Day celebrations which Sergeant Howie, unable to make any progress, is in danger of gate-crashing.
When Howie meets Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), there is a wonderfully staged clash of philosophies among the mounted antlers of the proud ancestral home. Summerisle explains how his agronomist grandfather re-converted the people to paganism, giving them back those "joyous old gods" which Christianity had robbed from them. Howie indignantly replies, "and what of the true God for whom churches have been build on these islands for centuries past? Now, sir, what of Him?"
Smirking, Summerisle replies, "he had his chance and, in modern parlance, blew it."
Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, who also wrote Sleuth (1973), was something of a specialist in setting up malicious games between people of opposing belief systems. In The Wicker Man, he ensures that the pagan aristocrat and the "Christian copper" are inverted mirror images of each other. Sergeant Howie is, he freely admits, a virgin, determined to await his forthcoming marriage as he believes his faith demands of him. Summerisle, on the other hand, revels in promoting precocious sexuality in the young.
Nicolas Cage and Kate Beahan
in The Wicker Man ( 2006) |
As the rivals watch --one with approval, the other with horror-- teenage girls jumping naked over flames in the hope that the fire god might impregnate them, Howie demands to know whether these children have heard of Jesus. Undaunted, Summerisle responds "himself the son of a virgin, impregnated, I believe, by a ghost."
Shaffer's script weaves queasily through such paradoxes, arriving at a fiery climax which is undeniably Wiccan, yet also resounds unhappily through Christian history. Christian martyrdom and pagan sacrifice end up looking very much like different sides of the same coin.
While the impact of the original movie was restricted by its art house release, The Wicker Man slowly and surely built up a loyal cult following. This was fueled by valiant efforts of crew and cast, particularly Lee, to make sure the movie would at least get the retrospective praise it deserved.
This August, a high-budget remake directed and co-written by Neil LaBute (using Shaffer's original script) hit cinema screens across North America.
In the new film, Scotland gives way to the U.S. Pacific coast (British Columbia was the filming location) and staunchly religious Neil Howie becomes disappointed middle-aged romantic Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage). The letter that sparks his search comes not anonymously, but through Malus's former girlfriend, Willow (Kate Beahan). Although Willow disappeared unexpectedly from Edward's life years ago, she now sees him as the only man who can look for her missing daughter.
Updating Wicca to the twenty-first century, it's the women, led by an icily urbane community leader Ellen Burstyn, who are in control of Summerisle. Men are merely mute and docile chattels. This attempt to give a nod to a more feminism-inflected view of the Wiccan religion is one of the movie's most disastrous blunders. However articulately expressed their philosophy, these particular pagans are murderous villains. Part of the shock of the original is how, after encouraging the audience to smirk at Howie's Presbyterian zeal, the plot reveals that everything the policeman suspects about paganism is horribly true after all.
To shift the philosophical clash from Christianity verses paganism to a simple gender war is highly troubling, especially given the inordinate amount of violence Malus uses to try and overcome the island cult.
Ellen Burstyn in
The Wicker Man ( 2006) |
Worse, clearly opting for an honest-Joe protagonist, the filmmakers give Malus no religious beliefs at all, odd considering the amount of fundamentalist Christian sentiment that exists in the U.S. Much of the dialogue is repeated verbatim from the 1973 film, yet as the philosophical structure supporting this dialogue no longer exists, the whole piece has the uncomfortable feel of a tribute that has forgotten the purpose of the work it is trying to honour.
In essence, the battle between Howie and the islanders in the earlier film is a clash of cults; both camps are entirely closed to ideas that might challenge them. In trying too hard to conform to audience expectations --chief of which is a protagonist with whom the viewer can instantly identify-- the remake misses this element completely.
Added to this is a levelling down of any potentially novel aspect of the movie in order to provide the audience with a generic North American movie-land product. The 1973 film, for instance, had an especially evocative musical score. Written by Paul Giovanni, the songs and instrumentals drew on diverse folk influences including Celtic pagan folk tunes and the verse of Robert Burns. The remake churns up the now thoroughly hackneyed "horror" soundtrack device of inlaying many whispering voices into the music.
It's curious that a movie which stood the test of time because of its uniqueness has spurned a remake so eager to fit into the ordinary. But perhaps there's a lesson here.
If you want to pay tribute to a movie, don't remake it.
Paul Butler is the author of the novel NaGeira (2006) which deals with the clash between Wiccan and Christian ideologies in seventeenth century Newfoundland. His website is www.paulbutlernovelist.com
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