The Wicker Man: the Final Cut (Hardy, 1973): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm
This screening, with an introduction by Alex Cox and Nick Freand Jones, is part of the great Moviedrome: Bringing the Cult TV Series to the Big Screen season. Other screenings of The Wicker Man take place on July 18th and 28th. Details here.
Time Out review:
All those sacrifices to the
cinema gods must have worked, because after a yearlong worldwide search,
the final cut of ‘The Wicker Man’ has been found. The thrill of seeing
the 1973 cult classic on the big screen is reason enough to drop
everything and go – but doubly so with this longer version, which deeply
enhances the film’s eerie pagan weirdness. That creepiness is what made distributors delete some of the film’s
most evocative scenes: a sermon at the start, the ‘Gently Johnny’ song
segment with snail-on-snail action and more of Christopher Lee’s
splendid Lord Summerisle. The print quality is variable and much of the ‘new’ material has
appeared on DVDs previously. Whole websites have been dedicated to
spotting the differences, so fans will keep debating about which version
is ‘definitive’. What an incredible treat, though, to see it all in one
place, in the cinema, as director Robin Hardy intended. ‘The Wicker
Man’, as a British classic, has it all: ‘Carry On’-style gags, a
haunting folk soundtrack, spectacular Scottish landscapes, Edward
Woodward’s stiff-upper-lip sense of duty, a critique of organised
religion and that still-harrowing ending.
Kathryn Bromwich
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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