The Wicker Man
FOR EDWARD WOODWARD, 25 October 1972 was the toughest day of his career.
Here he was, shooting a low-budget British thriller close to the edge of a 100-foot cliff overlooking the Solway Firth, wearing nothing but a shirt in bitingly cold winds. The previous day he’d broken a toe being dragged barefoot up the hillside, brought to the scene of his (spoiler alert!) character’s shock-ending sacrifice at the hands of a community of cheery, murderous pagans, led by Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle. Today, Woodward had already been thrown over the shoulder of a Scottish wrestler and hoisted up a ladder to the belly of a 36-foot-high, creosote-coated wicker colossus — a “really frightening” experience. He was also in a bit of a panic. Owing to a lastminute schedule change which brought this scene forward by a day, he hadn’t had a chance to memorise the Biblical tracts his character, the aggressively pious Sergeant Howie, was to yell at Summerisle’s followers while he went up in flames. As such, huge cue cards had to be erected for him to read. Then, as the cameras rolled, the nervous goat incarcerated above him — a local mascot named Touchwood — started pissing on Woodward. “At least,” he would later note, “it was warm.”
The Wicker Man was a film beset by harsh conditions, creative differences (not least between director Robin Hardy and writer Anthony Shaffer), stretched budgets and corporate mistreatment. But it remains a hugely influential curio, inspiring, among other discomfiting treats, The League of Gentlemen TV series and Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Its crowning moment is the climactic revelation of the title’s meaning: a towering, faceless wicker structure built for the express purpose of burning a God-fearing cop to death (along with Touchwood, a calf and a few chickens) in order to rectify local crop failures. It is one of cinema’s greatest endings. An accolade that was certainly hard-earned.
After being rushed into production, a story set during springtime had to be realised in the grip of an early Scottish winter. Exposed to the wind on that chilly cliff-top, the actors held ice cubes in their mouths to stop their breath from showing. “It was freezing all the time,” said Ingrid Pitt, the Hammer Horror regular who took the role of Summerisle’s librarian. “In Scotland that’s not funny.”
Only Lee, it seems, enjoyed himself, having found a way out of his Hammer Dracula dead end with a project that truly enthused him. “The Wicker Man was the best film I’ve ever been in, the best part I’ve ever had,” he said. Though he sympathised with Woodward: “Poor Edward must have gone through hell.”
Still, the man who would become The Equalizer remained brightly philosophical about the experience of shooting that astonishing sequence. “It was very tricky. Very dangerous. Very worrying,” he once said. “But you know, you do these things when you’re young.” Or in your early forties, but who’s counting? THE WICKER MAN IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL