|
Blake's Songs of Experience, in "modern parlance." The incisive satire makes itself at home in the age of communes, Christian severity and pantheistic sensuality are the poles. The Scottish island is a haven of bawdy ballads and fertility dances, a monument to "pagan barbarity" to the police sergeant (Edward Woodward) who arrives from the mainland to investigate a missing girl. The villagers teach their children early about the resonance of phallic symbols, enjoy sex and music and druidal superstitions, and smile at the puritan who bristles at nymphs leaping amid erect stones. "They are... naked!" The bountiful soil has turned barren and locals have to eat out of cans, nothing a little human sacrifice won't solve. The basis is not Hammer fright, but the Powell-Pressburger of I Know Where I'm Going! The hero is stolid piety personified, wandering around the remains of a church and improvising a crucifix when faced with a maiden suckling her baby. His virtue is ironclad enough to resist a bare, ululating Britt Ekland rubbing herself against his bedroom walls. ("I must say, you are a gallant fellow," the temptress chirps in the morning.) His sparring partner is the shaggy Byronist (Christopher Lee), "a heathen, but not an unenlightened one" who argues for the old gods because the new one "blew it." Anthony Shaffer's scenario is a mordant study of theological anxiety, Robin Hardy gives it a sunlit sheen, soft, travelogue-ish, gradually realizing it's a horror story. A skillfully sustained jest, with its vibrant Celtic punchline on the identity of the slaughtered lamb capping the fête of animal masks and kilted jesters. The wooden behemoth of the title lights up as a pyre by and for ideological monsters, "a very lovely transmutation." With Diane Cilento, Ingrid Pitt, Lindsay Kemp, Russell Waters, Aubrey Morris, Irene Sunters, and Gerry Cowper.
--- Fernando F. Croce |