Having acquired the film as part of the ailing studio British Lion, EMI unceremoniously hacked down Hardy’s original edit from 102 to 88 minutes for U.K. Cilento was in the final stages of her marriage to Sean Connery during the shoot, and later married Shaffer.Ī commercial flop on British cinema screens back in 1973, The Wicker Man began its slow journey to global cult status in the U.S. Ekland’s Nordic vowels and naked bottom both required stand-ins.
The colorful cast of unlikely Celts includes Swedish starlet Britt Ekland, Australian-born Diane Cilento and Polish horror-movie veteran Ingrid Pitt. While the picturesque Scottish locations are authentic, the locals speak a preposterous polyglot gumbo of accents. Lee is the chief offender here, closely followed by Lindsay Kemp – former mentor and lover of David Bowie – as a camp pub landlord. Watched today, however, some of the performances look comically hammy. In some scenes it feels like a psychedelic hippie musical, in others a creepy soft-porn thriller. The film’s spellbinding score of haunted folk ballads, composed and arranged by transplanted American songwriter Paul Giovanni, has also earned evergreen cool status among generations of bearded acoustic hipsters.
The notion of a spiritually inclined death cult run by a charismatic guru has since acquired plenty of real-life parallels, from Jim Jones to David Koresh to Osama Bin Laden. Initially an obscure midnight movie, The Wicker Man has become more culturally resonant during its 40-year afterlife.
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