The Wicker Man

Hi Aki,

Last night I saw the original Wicker Man, a film that is surely a great candidate for a remake: great cast, intriguing idea, but bad direction (rather, wrong-headed direction) which spoilt it all, almost. Hard to really complain with any movie that mocks a strait-laced Christian prude who can’t get it on with naked Brit Ekland dancing in the next room begging him to come join her, or the couples fucking on the lawns, or naked girls jumping over fire, or Ingrid Pitt with a come-hither look as she lounges in her brass tub…

So here’s the story, and I’ll be spoiling it for you, as fair warning.

A Scots police sargent gets an anonymous letter saying that a girl, Rowan Morrison, has gone missing on Summerisle, and enclosing a photo. The cop flies his seaplane out to the island, but all the locals swear they’ve never heard of the girl, and don’t recognize the photo. But queer things are afoot in this island, and the people are clearly stone-walling him.

As he continues to investigate, the cop finds that Christianity has been abandoned here, and the whole populace have gone back to paganism with weird, mad rites (at least they look mad to him). He is sure the girl has been murdered, but finding her grave at last, he digs it up to discover – a dead hare in the coffin.

Act 2 ends on the early morning of the May Day festival. The cop researches in the library on the festival as it was practiced in middle ages, and leaps to the conclusion that last year’s crop failed, and that Rowan is alive … and will be ritually murdered in the course of today’s mayday.

This is the end of Act 2 because the detective has solved the case; it is also, in a story with a bad ending, the ‘bright moment’ when he is closest to understanding what is going on. He now knows what happened to the girl, who is behind it, and why.

He leaps in his seaplane to fly back to the mainland and get help, but the plane won’t start – sabotaged.

So he spends the morning and early afternoon going in every house and building, searching for the girl. An action montage of this search is sequence 7. He doesn’t find her, and instead steals the innkeeper’s Mayday costume – the Fool – and inflitrates the procession. More action as he is mute witness to the festivities, which end at the beach – where the girl Rowan is revealed, dressed in a white shift and tied to a post, clearly meant to be sacrificed.

(It’s possible that this moment is second curtain, and that ‘She’s not dead!’ could be the midpoint. I didn’t time it out.)

He races up to her. The girl is frightened, and begs him to save her. She says she knows the way through the caves behind them, and with the island mob coming up from the beach on the cop’s heels, there’s no other way to go.

Rowan leads the cop through a maze of caves, always upward. The islanders are behind them, but he throws her flower crown down a side-cave and tricks them. Cop and girl reach the top, and climb out on the hilltop…

End of sequence 7, twist into 8:

… to find the island leaders waiting for them. Rowan runs down to Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee in a bad wig) and asks, ‘Did I play it all right?’ ‘My child,’ he answers, hugging her, ‘you played it beautifully!’

Summerisle proceeds to explain the facts to the cop. This is a clever inversion of the traditional scene where the detective gathers all the chief suspects and rehashes the mystery, ending with ‘And you did it!’ Instead it’s the chief suspects who rehash the mystery for the detective, ending with ‘And you’re the sacrifice!’ (which is also a candidate for the twist; I often find things like climaxes, twists, are doubled, but the pairs are placed very close together – in this case, in the same scene. General examples would be the A storyline and B storyline will have their climaxes close together, B then A)

‘Our crops did fail, disastrously. The sacrifice of an animal is good, but a child is better. The sacrifice of a child is better, but better still the sacrifice of the right kind of adult.’

‘One who came to us willing,’ says one sexy wench. ‘One who is the representative of a king,’ says another; ‘One who is a virgin,’ says Brit. ‘One who is a fool!’

This scene is a trifle too long and wordy, complicated by the cop’s assertion that do what they will, they will never shake his faith, and he spits some of his catechism to them. To which Lord Summerisly replies, ‘And so we give you the greatest boon of your own faith, which is martyrdom … you will be able to sit with the saints in Paradise.’

The cop is then stripped by the sexy women, his wounds and dirt washed, his hands anointed, and dressed in a white sacrificial robe. He is then carried up to the bluff where at last is revealed The Wicker Man, a towering figure (Burning Man’s effigy is based on this movie’s close) in which are already tied up chickens and geese, pigs, a lamb, a cow. The cop is tied up in the effigy’s chest, and the whole set afire.

As the sun sinks, and the islanders dance and sing (the movie is perilously close to a musical, believe it or not) with joy on their faces, Wicker Man burns, and the cops spits and screams scripture, until at last the effigy collapses in flames, the sun sinks, and the credtis roll.

I didn’t time it, as I say, but my guesstimate is that it would be a page, 1.5 pages, to find out the seaplane is kaput;

• 1.5 pages of house to house search
• 1.5 pages at the inn to get into the costume and knock out the innkeeper
• 2, 3 pages of rituals
• a page of running through the caves
• 2-3 pages of confrontation with the islanders as truth comes out
• 1.5 pages of burning (maybe call it 2 pages with anointing, washing)

Running time is about 90 minutes.

Chief mistake in direction is to place us more in sympathy with the pagans than the cop. So we are laughing at the fool as he refuses to go on over and fuck Ms Ekland, that he can’t enjoy ogling the teen girls leaping naked over the bonfire, or offer to towel off the busty Ms Pitt, or even to get a clue. Thus, we can have no sense of the wrongness he feels he’s seeing, or the threat, and fear for the ‘madness’ of what is going on in this isle.

Not sure what writer Anthony Scheaffer had in mind. He might himself have been mocking the traditional Catholic, he might have considered the story prophetic at a time of rising paganism, back to nature movements, and the collapse of worship at traditional churches. Movie audiences would have been almost all boomers, hippies and the like, who had cheered the sexually promiscuous Dracula and mocked the virginal boyfriends in the Hammer films. But this makes the movie a more intellectual game, and to pitch us over to the islanders’ way of seeing things would require a total rewrite, letting us in on the secret from the start, and seeing the cop as a potential threat, and the game as dangerous if he manages to get back to the mainland and expose them.

Anyway – you see that act 3 is very short, and there’s very little that happens after the twist. Basically: he gets stripped, washed, and taken to the effigy, and burnt alive.

(26 January 2009)