For those of you who have never seen the 1974 film The Wicker Man, I recommend that you buy or rent this film and watch it on May Eve. Those who have seen the film will hopefully agree with me when I suggest that the first time you hear the soundtrack it should be while viewing The Wicker Man because, outside of films based upon musicals, there have been few films in which the music so thoroughly creates the very setting of the film.
In case you are not familiar with the film, The Wicker Man is about a young Scottish policeman who receives a mysterious letter which claims that a young girl has disappeared from her home on the remote island of Summerisle. The policeman travels to the isolated island and discovers that the inhabitants practice long-forgotten Pagan beliefs.
While The Wicker Man is often referred to as a horror film, the wild beauty of the island which seems to exist outside of time and the equally beautiful music combine to evoke an uncanny but magical place worthy of any fantasy film.
The film’s opening scenes show the severe and ascetic Sargeant Howie in the sterile industrialized city in which he lives and the starkly plain church in which he prays. Soon, however, Howie sets out for Summerisle in the Western Hebrides, and the drone of the small plane he flies over the vast empty ocean is accompanied first by the drone of bagpipes and then the melancholy song of a female singer. As Howie descends earthward, he catches glimpses of objects which seem more the stuff of dreams than of the modern world — a rider on a white horse, an old boat with an eye painted on the prow, an abandoned church (“Opening Music / Loving Couples / The Ruined Church”).
Although Howie will realize it too late, we, the viewers and listeners, already sense that we have landed upon one of fantastic fiction’s most strange and beguiling islands.
Howie, however, has yet to realize that he has slipped between the worlds and time to a place where people regard his religious dogma and endless regulations as more amusing than authoritative and, when he wanders into The Green Man, the small village pub, his senses as well as his morals are assaulted by the bawdy ballads and rowdy dancing (“The Landlord’s Daughter,” “Gently Johnny”).
If Howie is an ascetic, determinedly practicing a joyless self-denial, then the inhabitants of Summerisle practice an ecstatic Paganism, for Howie discovers that he has stumbled, quite literally, upon Summerisle’s preparations for May Eve (“Maypole,” “Fire Leap,”). The teasing humor and sexual freedom in which women appear to revel (“Willow’s Song,” “The Tinker of Rye”) in particular come close to rendering Howie completely incoherent with outrage.
Howie is soon caught up in trying to impose order upon a May Eve festival which is all about upsetting order and playing games ((“Procession,” “Masks / Hobby Horse”) although the games become increasingly dark (“Chop Chop”), escalating to a game of hide-and-seek in which the life of a young girl is at stake (“Searching For Rowan”). Amongst the high cliffs of the island, however, Howie finally comes to the end of the chase, and neither his father-god nor his god of light are a match for the wild darkness of the old gods or, at the very least, the darker side of human nature (“Appointment With The Wicker Man,” “Festival / Mirie It Is / Summer Is A-comen In,” “Sunset”).
Music by songwriter/composer Paul Giovanni with additional lyrics by Peter Shaffer, music by Gary Carpenter and Magnet.
(Silva America, 2002)
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