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The Wicker Man (1973)

The band Radiohead is a lot of things—innovative, enigmatic, atmospheric, mopey—but one thing they are that they’ve always been really excellent at is being British. So it stands to reason, or is at least not very surprising, that the band’s release of its first single and attendant video in five years finds them making a pointed statement about The World Today by way of parodying two pieces of British pop culture that are relatively iconic across the pond but pretty obscure/cultish here in the U.S.

The Chris Hopewell-directed video for “Burn The Witch” features stop-motion animation and cartoon-bucolic look—starting off with a wooden bird chirping in a tree—is an elaborate and accurate homage to Trumpton, a mid-1960s children’s program televised by the BBC, telling tales of a small town where the Town Hall clock tells the time “steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly.” A community where all is as it should be.

In Radiohead’s vision, a parable about anti-immigrant sentiment and rising jingoism the world over, the residents clearly feel that all is not well, or at least that all will not continue to be well without some form of blood sacrifice. “This is a roundup,” the band’s singer Thom Yorke intones over shots of a bowler-hatted man taking a tour of the video’s village. Soon, the visitor is asked to unveil a large structure on a field of green. He sees it’s a giant wicker statue of a man, and the villagers encourage him to climb a ladder and get into the chamber built in the middle of its chest. Bad idea.

This is where the video takes inspiration from the live-action 1973 horror classic The Wicker Man, which is available for rental via Amazon Video, or for free if your Amazon Prime also includes a Starz subscription. The movie is a durable cult item that took plenty of time gaining a cult. In the decade that encompassed 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on one end and 1980’s Friday the 13th on the other, The Wicker Man seemed relatively subdued. Written by Anthony Shaffer (then best known for his tricksy stage play Sleuth) after he became fascinated by studies of paganism in the British Isles and elsewhere, the movie is an exemplary, and doom-laden, fish-out-of-water tale.

Edward Woodward, in later years a hit on American television as the stoic The Equalizer, plays Sgt. Howie, a police investigator and a church-going man of the Extremely Uptight variety, is dispatched to an Edenic-seeming isle in the Hebrides to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He’s turned off right off the bat by the hippieish locals who celebrate May Day with a fervor that’s a little beyond what normal folks consider appropriate for heralding in the spring. These folks are full-fledged pagans, it would seem, and they’re blithely unconcerned with Howie’s investigation. This enrages Howie, who has a pretty low boiling point to begin with. He’s further frustrated by the island’s oversee, Lord Summerisle, whose name is also the island’s own. Summerisle is completely forthcoming to Howie about the island’s devotion to the old gods, which appalls Howie. Howie is similarly appalled by the seductive singing and dancing of Willow, the daughter of the landlord of the inn where he’s staying. (That inn is called The Green Man, after a fertility god in pagan practice; the great novelist Kingsley Amis wrote a ripping supernatural yarn of that title in 1969.) But since Willow is played by Swedish-born then-sex kitten Britt Ekland, he’s not as appalled as he’d like to be. The spectacle of his resisting her attempted ministrations is both painful and a little comic.

The movie is effective for a number of reasons: Shaffer’s intelligent script, Robin Hardy’s coherent direction, Paul Giovanni’s superb score (interwoven into the narrative in an unusual way, it makes smart use of old English folk music modes), the sun-dappled cinematography of Harry Waxman. But its most outstanding feature is the way its two lead actors, Woodward as the authoritarian and genre great Christopher Lee as Summerisle, play against each other. It’s interesting to see Lee, with his ever-regal bearing and stentorian, orotund mode of speech, playing a long-haired character who’s philosophically some kind of hippie, or so it would seem at first. Eventually Summerisle reveals himself as a man who gets things done. And Woodward’s Howie, for all his insistent protests about being in the right—which, as it happens, he is, because for all the pleasant trappings of the pagans’ lifestyle, they are all complicit in terrible crimes—is both extremely irritating and eye-rollingly naïve. Eventually Howie is introduced to the title character, so to speak, which is quite a bit more imposing in this live-action film than it is in the animation reduction featured in the Radiohead video.

The movie underwent a bunch of cuts at the hands of uncomprehending distributors when it was first prepped for 1973 release, upon which it resoundingly flopped. Its restoration to 96 minutes in 1979, prompted in large part by Christopher Lee himself (he long told interviewers that this was his favorite of all his movies; Woodward would go on to say the same), led to its rediscovery—this was the version of the film that I saw for the first time—and reappraisal. It was subjected to what was largely condemned as a highly ill-advised 2006 remake, starring Nicolas Cage. It’s clearly the 1973 film that the Radiohead video references. It’s likely that even if you’re not familiar with the movie, the iconography has some resonance. Still, the movie is totally worth checking out and it’ll help you make even more sense out of the deeply pessimistic vision “Burn The Witch” presents.

[Where to stream The Wicker Man]

Veteran (that is, old-ish) critic Glenn Kenny has written for oodles of publications and these days reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com. He blogs at Some Came Running and tweets (mostly in jest) at @glenn__kenny.