It seems fitting to start with this film, since I was talking about it when a listener recommended that I launch this blog. (That could have been a subtle way to get me to stop running at the mouth, but I prefer to think otherwise.)
If the title puts a bad taste in your mouth due to the 2006 Nicolas Cage remake, let me assure you that the original is much more popular, despite the condemnation by a producer at the time who might have had something to do with the poor theater distribution and the suspiciously lost negatives. I have not seen the remake to compare, but at least this time there are no bees. Partly, I suppose, because they did the shooting well into fall in Scotland, a fact that might be most discernible when more than half the outdoor "nudes" are in body stockings.
Genre?
This being a Hammer Film -- the first I've ever dared to see -- it is generally classified as horror, but it spends very little time trying to scare the audience. It gets an R rating for sexual content more than violence. IMDb also labels it a mystery, but while protagonist Sgt. Howie does detective work and gets surprised, he doesn't amass a whole lot of clues or impress us with his deductions. Filmmakers offered to call it a melodrama or even a musical, what with at least four character-performed songs surviving the heavy cuts (no horror pun intended). The songs are actually rather fun in a '70s way, and the characters always have a reason for singing.
Me, I consider it a tragedy. Almost an Aristotelian tragedy, given how Howie is neither fully innocent nor too rotten to grieve, but his downfall has more to do with slight foolishness than sin. I'm sorry if you think this a spoiler; it's just that unhappy endings are rare enough (albeit less so in the early '70s) that many viewers might rather know in advance.
Pre-Spoiler Plot
On the mainland, Howie receives an anonymous letter asking him to investigate the 8-month absence of a 12-year-old girl named Rowan Morrison from a Scottish isle known simply as Summerisle. (The opening credits thank the citizens of Summerisle for their cooperation, but that's a typical horror movie fib: There is no real place by that name. The Summer Isles come closest.) He arrives and immediately finds the locals reluctant if not completely unhelpful. Even Mrs. Morrison and a classroom full of girls Rowan's age act as tho she never existed. Did someone send a photo of another girl and make Rowan up out of whole cloth? Howie slowly finds evidence to the contrary, along with no shortage of signs that traditional local paganism reigns supreme on Summerisle. While his apparent lack of tolerance or even imagination for any faith but Christianity is off-putting (dude, you're a 20th-century policeman, not a missionary), he has cause for concern about the potential for human sacrifice, which could well explain Rowan's conspiratorial disappearance.
Yeah, it's basically one hero and a hundred villains. If there's a main villain, it's Lord Summerisle, played by the one cast member I recognized, Christopher Lee, in one of his favorite roles to this day. His lordship, as he tells Howie, is one of the few residents who ever knew Christianity outside of a comparative religion course, and his father revived paganism in order to reinvigorate the town. Sounds a bit like Cat's Cradle, in which a man founds a cult he openly disbelieves and others at least pretend to believe for peace of mind.
By this time, I didn't know who should find the film more offensive: pagans for feeling vilified or Christians for seeing their faith lose the contest. Yet my research has turned up no vocal umbrage from either, and I don't feel too strongly about it myself. The main objection came from the RSPCA, before an assurance that no animals would be sacrificed in the making of the film.
Again, sorry if that sounded spoilery to you in spite of my claim. Some stories are just hard to discuss without getting into details from quite a ways in. So far I haven't divulged much more than the Netflix disc jacket, and I'd already gleaned a bit about the remake years ago.
More Spoilers
Lee says in the accompanying documentary that when approached with the title, he immediately asked whether it had to do with druids and human sacrifice. The answer: "I hate you." Wicker men were a little lesser known in those days. But I had no idea just how big they got, nor that they would house more than a single human.
Howie may have served decently as a detective, but he really should have asked himself certain questions. For starters, why would the letter be addressed to him in particular? Does he specialize in missing person cases? Is he that famous outside his hometown? (A novelization indicates a stalker on the mainland, but that leaves other questions unanswered in my mind.)
Second, does it make sense to go alone, especially to an isle with no known police or telephone service of its own? If any foul play was involved, he might well need backup in his occasional threats to arrest people. And if for some reason he couldn't use his seaplane anymore, the next piece of land would take days to reach by rowboat.
Third, if everyone he meets is part of the conspiracy, then who could have written the letter? Surely no one outside the isle would even have heard of Rowan. Anyone who had a good idea of what happened to her should have added more details in the letter. Could the writer have been killed or abducted as well?
After discovering that his seaplane stopped working, Howie decides to keep handling things on his own. He hits the library and realizes that it wouldn't make sense to sacrifice Rowan in August or September; they'd save it for May Day, which just so happens to be the present. He figures that the islanders locked her away somewhere for 8 months in preparation for sacrifice once they saw the lackluster early harvest. Still not the most sensible setup there, but a fair conclusion under the circumstances.
Howie confirms a conspiracy against him when he feigns sleep and overhears an attempt by his hoteliers to keep him asleep with some sort of incense, which he puts out. Then he sneaks up behind the one other man left in the place, knocks him out, and steals his clown costume for the May Day parade. This allows Howie to get close enough to find and release a tied-up Rowan and run off with her, letting her lead the way thru a slight mountain cave maze. But the scenario calls forth the fourth question, or maybe a rephrasing of the second: What can you do when it's just you versus everyone else in reach? Where could they run?
That turns out to have been a moot point as Rowan reveals the real twist: She was never in any danger. It was all a setup to bring him right where they wanted him, a short walk from the wicker man. They chose him of all halfway-nearby outsiders because he fits certain criteria, like bearing the king's seal and being a virgin. And as I saw how few minutes remained in the movie, I knew he would not escape.
Further reflection got me wondering how much the natives planned. Seemingly the only reason they didn't overwhelm Howie right at the dock was that they wanted to give him the chance to come "voluntarily" to the sacrifice, particularly "as a fool." Guess they didn't use real knockout gas and weren't too concerned about the one guy's blow to the head. OK, there may have been another reason: At night, a nude seductress in the next hotel room sings and pounds the wall. Howie barely resists the urge to go to her, which may be enhanced by the only possible magic in the whole movie. If she didn't have a personal motive, then it was meant to test his chastity. Eh, I suspect it was largely the filmmakers' excuse to show us something steamier than a brief moonlit orgy and a fire dance.
Perhaps the scariest thing about the film is how the pagans comport themselves. Most of the time, they seem a pleasant and peaceable bunch; if you don't hold other religious convictions, you might want to move to the isle. But the entire community acts innocently happy while deceiving and then painfully killing someone who never wronged them -- who'd come to save someone, in fact. One woman implies that they'd readily sacrifice a baby if the god in question liked it better. They're not sadistic or spiteful; they think their actions work toward the greater good, perhaps even for the victim as he gets reborn. So strong is their faith that they hate to use words like "dead" for someone "in transition." Alas, Howie's faith in a heavenly reward for martyrs, which Lord Summerisle encourages in him, is not strong enough to prevent a reaction of absolute horror at the sight of the wicker man, followed by multiple attempts to persuade them not to use it. (It's not clear to me why they're so confident that no one will come looking for a missing officer.)
Concluding Thoughts
If I must rate on a scale, let it be a 10-point scale, where I give TWM a 7. I thought about an 8, because it's pretty original, mostly credible, and never boring (maybe just as well they lost the outtakes) and does a good job of hiding its low budget. Unfortunately, like so many B movies (yes, a little more often than bigger fare), it somehow can't manage any very smart characters, and some parts could use further explanation. As a "cautionary tale," it sends a message I can't really approve, if I even understood it right. Perhaps it's not so much "Don't trust pagans" as a general "Ask yourself a lot of questions." Either way, it doesn't set a great example.
No comments:
Post a Comment