THE WICKER MAN - Final Cut (1973/2013): A year or so ago, a plea was made searching for any materials anywhere in the world to help restore this film. The film's original negative has long been missing (one theory holds it was used for landfill UNDER a London street!). After all that searching...well, not much, sadly. This "Final Cut" is largely the same as the 1980 release (dubbed the 'Abraxas Cut' by Wicker devotees) which played the Orson Welles Cinema - and, in a nice bit of serendipity, was found at the Harvard Film Archive! I believe that Christopher Lee came to town to promote it back in the day.

This "Final Cut" has been re-edited slightly, but it is essentially the Abraxas cut. It actually runs a tad shorter than the longest existing version, but Director Robin Hardy says he prefers this edition. Unfortunately, some of the scenes are dupes of film prints, so they stick out in their graininess (and the very first scene, unfortunately, is one of them. Folks were gasping and wispering "Oh, no!" when the movie began. Fortunately, most of the movie doesn't look like that)

As to the film itself - GO SEE IT ON THE BIG SCREEN if you can! It's both not a horror film, and, in some ways, the ultimate horror film (even if it doesn't live up to the "Citizen Kane of Horror movies" tagline from Cinefantastique that they still use). What THE WICKER MAN does so well is to delve into the deepest heart of faith, belief & cults and their relationship with life and death. Some call it paganism, others, religion.

Writer Peter Shaffer creates an incredibly complex web of psychological paranoia (he also wrote SLEUTH and Hitchcock's FRENZY). Edward Woodward (long before The Equalizer) plays the innocent policeman from the 'mainland' who comes to investigate a missing child on the Island of Summerisle. The less said about the subtle plot the better (and also try to block out memories of the laughable Nic Cage retread). Christopher Lee calls it his favorite performance, and there are also the charms of Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento and Ingrid Pitt to behold. Cilento, in particular, delivers a strong performance.

It's great that this version is out there for folks to discover and re-discover (and a DVD is upcoming), even if it is less than the ultimate "final cut".

I did.  Liked it.

Boston folks who missed it do have another chance - the Harvard Film Archive will be running their 35mm print at 9pm on December 20th.  I gather the DCP used this as the framework but substituted better elements where available (and cleaned it up some), so there are likely some trade-offs in terms of quality, but it's always fun when the HFA digs out stuff like this.

There might be a couple minutes' difference; the HFA lists their version as 91.5 minutes, which is different from everything else.  Hopefully the DVD/BD will include a booklet that describes where everything came from, a la Criterion.  It could be entirely possible that they only had DVD-quality material for some of the movie, which isn't good enough if you're looking to do a HD release or make a decent DCP.

They'll probably talk about this at the HFA screening; those guys tend to dump a lot of info before the movie runs.  I won't be in town for that, though.