The rest of the casting was more bizarre — mime-troupe leader Lindsay Kemp later to work in films with Derek Jarman was drafted to play the innkeeper, and Britt Ekland was chosen to play his voluptuous daughter, Willow.
Ekland seemingly could not produce a reasonable Scottish accent and so all of Ekland's dialogue had to to be dubbed in post-production by Glaswegian actress and singer Annie Ross ; with Ingrid Pitt — a Pole — already on board, there simply wasn't room for another unexplained foreign accent.
Unfortunately, the crude dubbing of Willow's voice remains a large flaw in the final film. Filming took seven weeks during late autumn The shooting was done in some 25 locations, mostly around the film's base of Newton Stewart, Scotland; none of the filming was actually done on a real island.
Hardy: "In all the towns and villages where we shot, while all the buildings you see are real, frequently, if you turned the camera around, down the road might be some dreadfully modern little house which would spoil the whole effort. Matching up locations, tacking together a homogeneous town out of disparate buildings and even pieces of buildings, all sympathetic architecturally, is tricky but something I find quite fun to do.
Locals were recruited to fill out the crowd scenes, and pupils from a ballet school helped with some of the dance routines — everybody being kept warm with industrial fan heaters. Generally, shooting proceeded smoothly but one minor problem was encountered when some of the locals became convinced that the crew were planning to burn some animals alive as part of the movie's climax, including a goat used as a local mascot.
Fortunately, a reassurance from Shaffer soon calmed things down. Edward Woodward also broke a toe during one scene but due to a combination of cold, tiredness and drink didn't notice until the following morning!
The dank and depressing Scottish autumn together with the monotony of the filming began to get to Britt Ekland. Feeling lonely and believing she was being sidelined by most of the other cast, she later gave an interview to the Sunday Express in which she described the film's base, Newton Stewart, as "the most dismal place in creation Gloom and misery oozed out of the furniture," and added that she found the town to be full of hardened drinking and illegitimacy.
Whilst most parties seemed satisfied with this, Christopher Lee was most certainly not. Already about 15 minutes of filmed material had been jettisoned.
Two large sets of sequences went unused. The first showed Howie on the mainland investigating a pub that is making too much noise; the second had Howie making a bicycle journey to interview a mother on the island as part of his enquiries note the redundant "Mrs. Grimmond" credit on the titles at the end of the film. Christopher Lee's main source of annoyance was that a great deal of the scene in which his character, Lord Summerisle, explains the history of the island to Howie had also been removed, although, to be fair to Robin Hardy, this was too wordy and overlong in its original form and would have seriously damaged the flow of the film.
However, yet more damaging cutting was still to come New bosses were appointed in the form of Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley.
Neither was particularly keen on the project they found they had inherited. Deeley initially refused to release The Wicker Man , even in Britain, maintaining that it had no market value whatsoever he allegedly described it to Christopher Lee as one of the ten worst films he had ever seen, though Deeley himself denies this claim. Snell who was still at British Lion working out his contract tried hard to change Deeley's mind by promoting the film as much as possible — it was even entered in the non-competition section of the Cannes Film Festival that year, complete with a huge wicker man prop erected outside the main hotel!
From these screenings, the film was sold to a number of foreign territories. Meanwhile, Deeley contacted Roger Corman in Hollywood, who had seen the wicker man prop at Cannes and subsequently expressed interest in buying the film for American distribution, and sent him a copy of the Long Version of the film asking him to suggest changes to improve its marketability.
Corman's suggestions were to aim the film for the American drive-in market. To facilitate this, Corman suggested that the film needed tightening and proposed about 13 minutes worth of cuts. Deeley realised that shortening the film would also allow it to play as a B-picture a secondary, supporting movie, to be shown as part of a double bill back in the UK.
Parts of the plot were changed around, moving some of the details of Howie's second night on the island such as Willow's nude dance scene forward to the first night. A long sequence involving the sexual initiation of a teenage boy by Willow was also removed. Hardy: "There was no consultation with any of us. This was the way the film was going to be, and — tough titty! It is especially ludicrous, grotesque even, to have Ekland's dance scene come in so soon — it makes no sense.
So finally, in December , The Wicker Man stumbled into release. Christopher Lee telephoned all the film critics that he knew, begging them to attend the film and even offering to pay for their seats! Some reasonable reviews followed but by mid the film had done most of its business. Unfortunately, National General went bankrupt four days after the deal was signed. In mid , Warner's tested the film in a few areas of the USA, mainly in the San Diego area, and a college theatre and assorted drive-ins in Atlanta — earning a highly favourable review in Variety — before giving up the struggle.
Throughout the rest of the seventies and early eighties, the film's standing grew to large proportions — particularly in America where its unavailability seemed to enhance its reputation. Hardy got in touch and explained that the film was now in a form far removed from what he and Anthony Shaffer had originally planned. Hardy contacted Peter Snell, and Lee and Shaffer in London and all four began an attempt to find a copy of the original Long Version in order to restore the film to a more complete form than the Short Version that had been given to Abraxas.
The first obvious port of call was the vaults at British Lion's Shepperton studio. Prev Article. Next Article. Related Articles Are you ready for a classic western Blu-ray review? It's time to look at another recently released Blu-ray film, ….
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The news sounded too good to be true, because we'd been down this road before with "The Wicker Man," a film whose video releases are just as arcane and complicated as the pagan horror film itself. There were three different edits of "The Wicker Man" floating around the home video market in the s, but minute version, the longest, was by far the most coveted, mostly because it was the only one where everything set up in the film's prologue is tied up neatly in its conclusion, giving "The Wicker Man" a quirky kind of symmetry.
The minute cut was also the only one that really made any sense at all. So when I found out that Videoscope in Palo Alto, CA or maybe it was Mountain View , had the minute version, I meticulously copied it tape-to-tape on the two-hour speed to ensure maximum quality before returning it.
While that tape with "The Slime People" et al had long since gone into the dumpster, I kept that copy of "The Wicker Man" through several moves as if it were some runic script on a piece of old parchment that had to be passed down from generation-to-generation.
As VHS gave way to DVD, there were a few special editions of "The Wicker Man," but all of them—even the 2-disc set from the reputable Anchor Bay—fell far short of the the version that I had preserved on a hand labeled videocassette.
Unfortunately, this newly restored version that's making its way through a limited theatrical release right now is just minutes long, dashing my hopes that I could retire that old home-recorded tape. In his Salon. I might be about to engage in spoilers here as I describe what's missing, but I'm not sure I can spoil scenes that are no longer there.
In one of the missing scenes, the stern Sgt. Howie Edward Woodward , who is engaged to be married, walks in on two of his fellow officers gossiping about him. Without this scene, there's really no reason to assume that Sgt. Howie isn't locked in some loveless marriage back on the Scottish mainland like other Christian men of his age and time.
When Howie's virginity is mentioned later in the film a key detail , we have to take Christopher Lee 's word for it, instead of hearing this from the people who knew and worked with the character. Having Howie put-upon by his own men, while emasculating, also makes his character a much more sympathetic figure, even with his rigidity. That lengthened conversation on apples that is also missing might sound inane if you haven't seen it played out, but the confrontation between Sgt.
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