DVD Review: The Wicker Man (1973 Version)

The Classic Mystery Suffers with Age

Before the Nicholas Cage slaughtered 2006 version, there was the seventies classic Wicker Man, a murder mystery about pagan rituals on an Irish island.

Unfortunately, time hasn't treated The Wicker Man very well, and watching the movie in its DVD format stands more to a testament of how messed up the seventies were than to the storytelling possibilities of film. 

Edward Woodward plays a detective who is dispatched to deal with a report of a missing child on a remote Irish island, and quickly learns that the town's people practice a strange pagan religion that is undeniably linked with the girl's disappearance. Woodward's staunch Christian morals act as a foil to the seemingly godless men and women of the island, who dance naked (a LOT) and seem intent on misleading his investigation.

The film's fascination with Irish music leads to its primary problem; in its early stages, it's halfway to a musical, whether it's a naked woman banging on the policeman's wall to seduce him and singing with an invisible set of musicians backing her or an impossibly well tuned children's choir singing a jolly tune around a maypole, the musical numbers destroy any creepiness the film might have made with its premise and instead leads to a lot of "what the hell?" moments. Likewise, the reliance on dialog doesn't work for the film, since its plot and characters are so predictable and undeveloped.

Woodward's completely naive lines and copious amount of disbelief are frustrating to watch, and his character is one-dimensionally moral. His entire identity seems based on the fact that he's a Christian, and no attempt is made to flesh out the character more.

The direction is decent, but attempts at motif (repeated shots of the sun) don't make up for the lack of a coherent plot. The frequent nudity furthers the film's inability to hold any sort of a serious tone, even if it does make the whole affair a bit more interesting.