THE WICKER MAN @ 50

Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Police travels to Summerisle in pursuit of a girl reported missing. The locals are cagey about whether they recognise her photograph and many deny knowing of her at all. A sawdust and porridge protestant, Howie is increasingly disturbed by signs of runaway paganism on the island with kids dancing around maypoles singing songs about turning into trees after death and kids in class reciting lessons about phallic symbols and circles of girls jumping over fires in the local stone henge. Local patriarch himself, Lord Summerisle, is not only fine with all of this, he's a willing leader of it. The local church is a ruin, overgrown with weeds. When Howie finds the grave of the girl he's seeking, it has a shrub growing from it with her umbilical cord dangling from the twig. He emerges from a night of grinding temptation still pure and ready to take his administrative disgust back to the city from which he will see to it that the whole island is wracked by nukes of Christian law. Do you like his chances?

Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man has travelled through cinema history in an exulted state, being anointed as one of the Unholy Trilogy of folk horror (along with The Blood on Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General) and the kind of movie that horror fans can show to those who are not with confidence that it will be enjoyed. One of the reasons for this is that, outside of expected protagonist/antagonist empathy, you really don't have to take sides or, if you do, you can choose pretty freely which one you're on, the pagans in cardigans or the law of the land in its stiff uniform, and the big ending will still pack a punch. A Britain rendered effectively secular by generating a great deal of the swinging sixties would have found this situation already terrifying by the bones pointed at both approaches to religion on show here. It allows, nay, encourages, a critical response as the plot tightens into reckoning and we are left with devastation before us and another suggested one to come.

Until they see the ending, many people who see this film for the first time wonder at why it's deemed a horror tale, perhaps expecting something witchy to leap out of the shadows. But this tale of the clash of beliefs that masks the futility of all of them carries a horror beyond the finale of the story: what if all of the things we hold sacred are just hobbies we paste over inevitable doom? Whether it's the big stodgy hymns on Sunday for the Sergeant or the live-in musical of the rustic hedonists the final images which could be interpreted (regardless of how it was intended) as cosmic heat death awaits everything that ever lived or will live on this planet.

I just mentioned the songs in the film and they're worth a thought in their own right. The performances range from the music being played on site (in the pub or outside) to some that lean closer to more conventional musicals where the singing is supported by off screen players. The seduction scene appears to be the landlord's daughter singing to the accompaniment of the musicians below in the bar but this could not be so in real life.  But this is key to the world building on Summerisle. The music is part of daily life whether it's around a maypole or at the pub and the film delivers it with a whimsy on the warm side of charming. Part of the magic of that holiday or where you grew up was how everybody was so involved in the life that they would strike up a bawdy ditty here or offer a sensitive love ballad there. The songs put the viewer into a strange position that bypasses the usual shock of any musical where someone starts singing the first song. These ones come from people who appear to have absorbed the passed life of one of their own as part of the overall continuum of living and part of that is to sing about it. It strengthens the claim that the islanders live like this rather than ever feeling shoehorned in.

(Quick aside: in the late '90s I'd stop by a record shop on the walk home from work, barely expecting to hear anything stimulating being aired when one day I liked the music so much I stayed around for the whole album, pretending to look at CDs. I asked the guy at the counter about it and he told me the band name and that I was hearing the last copy in stock. I bought it, Becoming X by The Sneaker Pimps. It's a great tight album from the rock end of trip hop but the track that got me was the last one, a stunning rendition of the seduction song from this movie, How Do. I still listen to it. They include some sounds form the film and last night I heard the word "Sergeant" uttered which they'd sampled for the song. It was a small but real thrill. Here it is.)

The casting here is superb. Edward Woodward as Sgt. Howie casts off his world weary Londoner spy in the tv show Callan and assumes the mantle of a permanently uptight Scottish cop. He must carry both the tabloid style outrage from his civilised city as well as his own disturbed bewilderment  and still invite us along with him. The empathy we afford him comes from his stance against what might as well be the whole world where he finds himself and that his fight might well be one for his life.

The trio of exotic women central to his investigations are variously putting on accents or dubbed which adds a layer of alienation. It would be a mistake to blame the saucy '70s of Benny Hill for their appearance as sexy functionaries when there is so much nuance on display. Even Britt Ekland who only mouths her  Scottish accented lines is given space to develop depth in a role that might have stopped at her being buxom and smiling salaciously. Ingrid Pitt adds a kind of felinity to her otherwise stiffened character as the island record keeper. Diane Cilento dusts off the peasant girl smirk she gave in Tom Jones and stretches it into the articulation of a teacher defending the education that so offends the intruder policeman. Surrounded by Carry On movies and the blurred lines of UK movies and TV of the time, the women of Summerisle, for all their salacity, hold down jobs and live day to day.

At the social apex of the island is Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle. He is physically imposing, credibly aristocratic, urbane and charming and looks untellably relieved at not having to grimace with the fangs of the role that brought him most fame. His lines about the origins of the island lifestyle are delivered with such smooth confidence you want to book your tickets before he finishes. His single moment of vulnerability is almost shocking as it is the notion that gives the audience real pause as well, As much of a fan of Hammer movies as I am, Lee was allowed nothing as profound as that moment.

There are three versions of this film available on home video. The one most people saw before the '90s was the cinematic cut. That was the one you saw on tv as I did when it came on one night in the early '80s and got all of us talking about it the next day at uni. It was already an old film by then but its power held us. Extra footage was discovered decades later and incorporated into the film as was the fashion at the time as the Director's Cut. Like Apocalypse Now Redux or The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen, this director's cut added scenes that only dragged the pace and served to obscure the central narrative. The one I saw last night was the one I hadn't yet seen which is called the Final Cut. This incorporates the more striking of the found material and doesn't hurt the flow too much. All three are available on a blu-ray available locally that also features a CD of the songs from the film. My recommendation is to watch the Theatrical Cut first which has the tightest telling of the story. Then try the Final Cut which does one thing right in that it plays the seduction as an event from Howie's second night on the island and gives the attempt on his virtue and the results much more weight. All of the cuts have the same ending.

The Wicker Man feels timely in this current climate of religious minorities blowing themselves into undeserved proportion simply by being louder than the society around which is claimed to be soullessly apathetic by comparison but is really a culture outgrowing its bronze age tenets. This extends into the public redistribution of garbage thinking which the plague and its social conditions have inadvertently given voice. The Wicker Man reminds us that the living of life in the present for the future exceeds in value against the obfuscations of the current crop of prominent bullshitters who think they can keep propping up the status quo regardless of how well our crops do or our self image feels comfortable. The Wicker Man is more of our time than its own. Let's hope it can just be an entertaining ride of a movie in the not too distant future.