By Emmet O’Cuana & Jackie Shannon
“What hope did we have with an audience who were fucking themselves silly in the back of their parents’ Fords?” director, Robin Hardy, has said of the failed US release of his single masterpiece, The Wicker Man, in drive-ins. Marketed originally as a B-movie horror film, the film was actually intended as a sincere evocation of pagan culture, and was a work of passion for star Christopher Lee, and Robin Hardy, who passed away on July 1 at the age of 86. It would remain the director’s singular key work.
Written by Anthony (Sleuth) Shaffer as an antidote to the sort of horror film that Hammer Studios were monopolising the box-office with at the time, 1973’s The Wicker Man was a deliciously strange thriller about a God-fearing Scottish cop (Edward Woodward) who investigates the disappearance of a young girl on a remote isle and finds himself immersed in Paganism. With terrific performances from Woodward, Lee, Ingrid Pitt and Britt Ekland, The Wicker Man is a weird mix of eroticism, eeriness, folksy naturalism and the macabre, and it remains one of the cinema’s true cult films. Its release history, however, is far more unsettling than anything that happens during its wonderfully perverse narrative.
Unbeknownst to the stars and filmmakers, The Wicker Man was to become a bargaining chip in the sale of its backing studio, British Lion, to EMI, which is where Michael Deeley, the true villain of the piece (he’s far more ruthless than Christopher Lee’s true believer, Lord Summerisle), enters the story. Overseeing the sale of British Lion, he insisted on cuts to the finished print by Hardy, who dutifully delivered a 99-minute version of The Wicker Man. This was sent to Roger Corman for a proposed US release, which proved fortuitous, as Deeley insisted on an even more truncated version of the pagan shocker, producing the 84-minute version that for many years was the most commonly available print. “This attitude that ‘people wouldn’t understand’ is far too prevalent,” Christopher Lee has said of the cutting of the film. “People should be able to use what’s left of their minds when they watch something.”
Ironically, it was only thanks to Corman having a print of his own that an eventual restoration of the film was possible – for as Lee revealed on the film’s 2011 DVD re-release, the masters somehow wound up in a landfill under Deeley’s watch…providing The Wicker Man with the dubious honour of being not just mishandled, but literally buried. The film would eventually be remade in 2006 by Neil LaBute (In The Company Of Men), who unsuccessfully applied his own gender concerns to the narrative, resulting in a much lampooned article of derision featuring a typically absurd performance from Nicolas Cage in the Edward Woodward role.
After only helming one other film since The Wicker Man – the little seen 1986 serial killer thriller, The Fantasist – Hardy mounted a bizarre sequel/remake to his greatest cinematic achievement in 2011 with The Wicker Tree, a low budget oddity based on his own 2006 novel, Cowboys For Christ. The film’s loose, satirical tone and up-front lack of suspense (the audience knows right from the start what is going to happen to the two naive Americans who end up on the film’s paganist British isle), however, mark it as wholly different to The Wicker Man, and the film was met with a perplexed lack of appreciation from critics and fans of the original, despite its Christopher Lee cameo.
One of the most unfairly neglected and criminally interfered with works of the cinema, 1973’s The Wicker Man – cited as an influence by everyone from directors, Ben Wheatley (The Kill List), and Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz), through to art rockers, Radiohead – might be Robin Hardy’s one true indelible contribution to cinema, but if you’re only going to have one major film on your resume, it’s certainly the kind of film that most directors would be more than happy to lay claim to…
