Inside the Wicker Man by Allan Brown

Author:Allan Brown [Brown, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857902177
Publisher: Polygon

The following May, Crown Books in New York published the novelized version of the film, written by Hardy from Shaffer’s script. With regional sub-distributors taking notice of the film, Hardy thought it wise to plough his advance from the book into an American promotional tour. The context seemed promising. Event movies had taken hold of cinemas but they were mostly of a science fiction or fantasy bent: Alien, Superman, Altered States and Dracula, featuring Laurence Olivier, all opened during The Wicker Man’s ‘triumphal march’ around America.

Hardy’s first task was to launch The Wicker Man at the 1978 Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. Speaking to the press, he seemed keen to confirm the American notion that Britain remained an exotic, anachronistic pocket of weirdness: ‘In Devon, they get rid of all foreigners and strangers – which is what they consider Londoners – and have a very private May Day festival. As far as I know, nobody kills people any more, though they half-remember it,’ Hardy told the Denver Post.

At midnight on 6 January 1979, the film opened in San Francisco. Christopher Lee attended its premiere at the Castro Theater in the heart of the city’s gay district, a benefit performance for the Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive which sold out its 1,200 seats. Lee Novikoff, owner of the city’s chain Surf Theaters, had seen The Wicker Man at Telluride in Denver and been hugely impressed. San Francisco concurred with him. Reviewing its run at the city’s Lumiere Theater, Robert Walden in the Sentinel compared it to ‘an elegant bone china teacup decorated with ornate little flowers that seem oblivious to the poison within’. The San Francisco Examiner said it was ‘to be commended for its ability to establish a chilling climate of terror in a contemporary situation without the deus ex machina intervention of monsters, demons or extraterrestrial beings’.

Robin Hardy was on hand for more press interviews. ‘These pagan rites are really the Roots of the Caucasian people,’ he said, referencing the then popular book and television series by Alex Haley which depicted the legacy of black slavery. ‘It was no accident that Hitler brought back all those pagan feasts at the Nuremberg rallies. The ovens would be lit later,’ he added. As in New Orleans, The Wicker Man found the area’s kooky liberalism more than beneficial. The film would eventually break house records at the Lumiere.

From San Francisco, the film slowly spread. In February it went to Oregon, where a local newspaper, The Oregonian, advanced a particularly sophisticated critique, at least for the Midwest: ‘It is easy to dismiss barbaric religions as the dark fantasies of brutal people,’ wrote Ted Mahar, ‘but in almost all times religion has been employed to justify atrocities of one kind or another. The Crusades, the Inquisition and centuries of witch-hunting were not merely carried out by religious people but by people fulfilling what they interpreted as religious duties.’

In March, The Wicker Man hit Seattle (‘Christianity remains stolidly judgmental and Druidism appears cheaply juiced up,’ said local critic Suky Hutton).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.