Note the key two words in the title; final cut’. Here’s the story of Robin Hardy’s film which, perhaps all others, defines the term cult movie’.
The negative and the outtakes of the film were stored at the vault in Shepperton studios. When it was bought, the new owner gave the order to clear the vault to get rid of all the old stuff. Foolishly, the vault manager put the negatives, which just arrived from the lab, with the ones which were to be destroyed. There is even a rumour that the negative ended up under the M3 motorway, such was the producer’s dislike of the film.
Now the wonderful StudioCanal have spent a year trying to find the missing material, but apparently to no avail Hardy’s Director’s Cut seems to be lost forever. What they did find however was a print of Hardy’s cut for distributors Abraxas in 1979 for the US release.
This is the version we have here. The main difference is that the Lord Summerisle character, played by Lee, is established much earlier on in a typically weird scene, and that it makes it a lot clearer the story takes place over 72 hours.
Hardy said: “It crucially restores the story order to that which I originally intended. This version of The Wicker Man will (Optimistically) be known as the Final Cut.
What all the versions of the film have is one of the strangest atmospheres ever put on film. On one hand it looks a bit 70s and sounds even more 70s with an acoustic, sometimes drippy soundtrack and lots of three-part harmonies. On the other it has a feel and logic all of its own, building up to a climax that is genuinely disturbing.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the plot sees uptight, fiercely religious cop Howie (Woodward) flying to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. The locals are rude and unhelpful, and blatantly lie they say they’ve never heard of the girl, then hint that she’s in the ground.
What is even more disturbing to Howie is that Summerisle seems to be a godless place the locals seem to practise paganism and worship the gods of sacrifice rather than the Christian God.
Even worse than the adults are the children, who seem oblivious to Howie’s concerns and more interested in painting hares. Howie begins to dig around and discovers that each year a girl is picked to represent the harvest, and that the missing girl was picked the year the crop failed was she sacrificed to the gods to appease them?
It’s still an extraordinary watch it is never clear whether what Howie sees is real or not. He sees some pretty extraordinary things couples copulating in a graveyard, a women breastfeeding in a ruined church but is in such a feverish state by the end who knows what is going on. By the time Britt Eckland tries to tempt him into her bedroom he is a sweaty, nervous wreck.
Woodward is terrific as the Christian clinging to his beliefs to the end, but is upstaged by Lee’s effortlessly aristocratic turn as Lord Summerisle. In this version we first meet him bringing a young victim to Eckland’s bed outside the inn, and he simply steals every scene he is in as the owner of the island who is concerned about the summer fruit harvest.
Even by the standards of the 1970s it’s a trippy, odd film with a genuinely disturbing undercurrent. It might look a little creaky in places Howie silencing the bar when he walks in is unintentionally hilarious but it retains a power all these years later.
Overall verdict: For any fans of horror, or films of the 1970s, this is a must-see, in a version that now makes more sense and has more of a flow than previous versions. If you’ve never seen it before, try and do so on the big screen it rewards that.
Reviewer: Mike Martin