The Wicker Man - Scenes filmed but never used

This document transcribes major scenes that are believed to have been shot for the film but not included in any of the three versions, and are now thought to be lost for good.

There were more mainland scenes filmed than ended up in any version of the finished movie. Howie is seen closing down a pub that has been serving after hours, almost causing one drinker to hurl a set of darts at his back. On exiting the pub, Howie has an old prostitute and customer arrested as they conduct "business" in an adjoining alley-way.

The film's production company thought that these scenes smacked too much of Z-Cars and they didn't even make the first cut of the film.

The scene where Howie leaves the police station to fly out to Summerisle was initially longer. Scenes with Howie being rowed to his plane were filmed, as was an exchange between two old fishermen who are looking on:

The longest unused sequence that is known to have been shot concerns Howie investigating a young girl who stayed with May Morrison, the mother who claims to know nothing about Rowan Morrison. The unused sequence starts just after Mrs Morrison has offered Howie a cup of tea in the back room of her shop. In the finished film, the picture cross-fades at this point to the first scene in The Green Man leaving completely unexplained what Howie did during the rest of the afternoon and evening. Although the actual meeting with Mrs Morrison was definitely shot, as was him returning to The Green Man, it seems the actual footage of him cycling to and from her house may not have been filmed.

Mrs Morrison: Not at all. It must be thirsty work asking all those questions.

Howie: Mrs Morrison, perhaps if you wouldn't mind - I mean, just so I can complete my report - may I take a look round the house?

Mrs Morrison: Of course you can. Only I don't suppose it's very tidy. My husband, like most of you men, leaves everything to be cleared up after him.

(Howie climbs the stairs and first enters Mr and Mrs Morrison's bedroom. He observes a "clutter of personal adult possessions" but little else. He then goes into a child's bedroom. In the cupboard he finds a rack of clothes that are far too big for a girl the age of Myrtle - Mrs Morrison's other daughter. Howie goes back downstairs)

Mrs Morrison: Why, you've found one of Holly's dresses, and you thought it was... Why it's just like a detective story!

Mrs Morrison: Yes, Mrs Grimmond's daughter. She came to stay with us last week when her mum was ill. She's a widow you see and can't really cope, poor soul. Here's your tea. Now drink it up while it's hot.

Mrs Morrison: Oh you know how girls are - scatter-brained. Holly's always forgetting things.

Mrs Morrison: Holly? Oh I'm afraid it's quite a long way. Mind you, I could lend you my bicycle, if you like. You go up the hill past the old church, then turn left by Serpent's Egg Hill...

(We cross-fade to the next scene. Howie cycles along in cutaway shots, eventually arriving at a whitewashed house. We then cross-fade and join a conversation between Mrs Grimmond and Howie. Holly stands watching)

Mrs Grimmond: ...So it's as I say. Sergeant Howie, I can't tell you who would write a wicked letter like that. All I know is that May Morrison's got just the one daughter - Myrtle.

Howie: But one thing I still don't understand is why you left your clothes behind when you'd finished your stay with Mrs Morrison.

Holly: I know. It was silly of me, wasn't it? Downright careless, mum said - didn't you, mum?

Mrs Grimmond: And so it was. She's a pretty girl, my Holly, but she doesn't always use her brains.

(Howie turns away and mounts his bicycle. As he pedals away, he faintly hears Mrs Grimmond and Holly laughing after him. Daylight is fading fast when suddenly Howie is confronted by a gigantic shadow looming at him out of the gloom - a strangely malformed water bird, with webbed feet, tremendous claws and monstrous beak. He brakes sharply and looks fearfully up: the creature is cut in topiary. He pulls himself together and rides on. Eventually, Howie arrives back at May Morrison's shop and quietly replaces her bike before heading across to the pub)

Sandwiched between Howie's meal at The Green Man and his evening walk, a scene was originally shot where Howie observes some more strange happenings in the pub...

(Howie enters the bar and his attention is drawn to a group of drinkers, including Lord Summerisle's servant Broome, who are cheering as the giant Oak is attempting to lift a smaller man on his shoulders)

Broome: Oh, it's all perfectly legal, don't you worry, Sergeant. They've had a falling out, d'ye see. But they can't fight because Alastair's so big and Duggald's so wee. So they've agreed to settle it this way.

Broome: He's trying to lift him up from the floor on his neck. If he succeeds, he wins the argument - that's if he doesn't break his neck in the process, mind.

Broome: Oh, it can happen. Quite easily as a matter of fact. Both Tom and Jock McLeod snuffed it that way, and they was both big buggers. Duggald's at least a hundredweight to lift d'ye see - and dead weight at that.

(Howie turns away in disgust and notices a clock which reads 11:15. He makes his way over to Alder MacGregor at the bar)

MacGregor: The licencing laws don't run here, Sergeant. This is Lord Summerisle's private island. He's his own Justice of the Peace, and he makes his own rules.

MacGregor: Sometimes. It depends how we feel. His Lordship don't care - as long as everyone turns up for work on time the next day, that is.

(Howie realises there is nothing he can do about the situation and leaves the pub for a stroll. MacGregor draws himself off a whisky and tosses it down)

The scene where Howie talks to Willow on the morning of his second day on the island was originally longer. After she has directed him to the school, he remembers something and walks back over to her...

Willow: Now let me see. The day after tomorrow will be May the second... Nothing as far as I know.

(Howie turns away and it dawns on him that a day has past since he heard the phrase used)

(But Willow has already disappeared back inside the pub. Howie shrugs and starts off towards the school again)

During Howie's chat with Miss Rose in the doorway of the schoolroom, there was originally some extra dialogue. The finished film cuts straight from the first line to the last.

Miss Rose: I was unaware that the police had any authority in matters of education.

Howie: Maybe not, but we work closely with those who do and, as I say, this will not go unreported.

Howie: No it was not, Miss. And let me make it plain, I do not snoop - I investigate.

Miss Rose: May one know - without too much self-important mystery making - what it is you have come here to investigate?

Howie: I've come to find a missing girl - a girl whom everyone says never existed.

Miss Rose: From Don Quixote - an enthusiastic visionary, a pursuer of lofty but impracticable ideals.

Miss Rose: Which did not prevent him from continually making a fool of himself.

Another extra scene occurs during the sequence where Howie wanders through the old graveyard and ruined church. Originally he looked in the ruined church after his first meeting with the old gardener, and then met him again afterwards.

Old Gardener: You know, to make people sleep. Grave earth for a light sleep, Hand of Glory for a deep 'un. I don't mind 'em taking a bit of earth - that don't make no extra work - but the other's something else.

Old Gardener: There are some answers you wouldn't understand. Go home - you've found what you came looking for.

Howie: I'm not so sure of that. And seeing you like digging so much, old man, I think I can get you some extra employment pretty soon.

When questioning the keeper of the local chemist, Mr Lennox, the scene originally started with Howie meeting him outside his shop. (In the finished film, the first line has been dubbed over the later footage inside the shop).

Lennox: Oh, I'm firstly a chemist, secondly a photographer, and thirdly a purveyor of thermos flasks and hotties.

Lennox: Hot water bottles. More efficacious than most of Doctor Ewan's specifics, believe me. Do you want your photograph taken?

(Lennox leads the way into the shop. Howie's attention is taken by a large bottle marked "foreskins")

Lennox: If ritually burnt they bring the rain. But, of course, up here there's very little call for them. Now how can I help you?

Howie: I understand that you take the harvest festival photographs every year - the ones I saw in The Green Man?

Howie's ride to Summerisle's castle was originally longer. After negotiating a ride in a trap driven by the Gillie, Howie spies some pregnant girls moving through the orchard, touching the fruit trees:

After arriving at the castle, he makes arrangements with the gillie to be driven back in half an hour's time.

Howie arrives at the laird's castle and meets Lord Summerisle. To Christopher Lee's dismay, large sections of dialogue were removed from these scenes. The full conversation was as follows...

Lord Summerisle: Well, he's dead. He can't complain. He had his chance and, in modern parlance, blew it.

Lord Summerisle: Don't you mean how? The people were persuaded that He had become less powerful than the old gods who still lived on in the woods and the water and the fire and the stone.

Lord Summerisle: My grandfather, actually. It wasn't all that difficult. The tradition of the arcane and the mysterious cleaves to the people of this island with a tenacity which makes it seem an inherent and inalienable possession. And as even you must be aware, Sergeant, there's no race which cultivates a keener sense of spiritual vision than the Celtic.

Lord Summerisle: In the last century, the islanders were starving. Like our neighbours today, they were scratching a bear subsistence from sheep and sea. But mutton and mullet, so to speak, are hardly the counters of prosperity. Dutifully, every Sunday the people - Baptist and Catholic, Presbyterian and Free Kirk - bowed as low as their respective religions permitted, to the Christian God and prayed for prosperity. But inevitably none appeared. In due course they came to realise that their reward was to be either in the colonies or - as the various priests indicated in a rare moment of agreement - in the next world. Then, in 1868, my grandfather bought this barren island and began to change things.

Lord Summerisle: A distinguished Victorian scientist, agronomist, free-thinker. How formidably benevolent he seems. Essentially, the face of a man incredulous of all human good.

Lord Summerisle: What attracted my grandfather to the island, apart from the profuse source of wiry labour that it promised, was the unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm Gulf-Stream that surrounded it.

Lord Summerisle: You see, his experiments had led him to believe it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he'd developed. So, with typical mid-Victorian zeal, he set to work. But of course, almost immediately, he met opposition from the fundamentalist priests who threw tons of his artificial fertiliser into the harbour on the grounds that if God had meant us to use it, He'd have provided it. My grandfather took exactly the same view of priests, and realised he had to find a way to be rid of them.

Lord Summerisle: The best way of accomplishing this, so it seemed to him, was to rouse the people from their apathy by giving them back their joyous old gods. So he encouraged, as it were, a retreat down memory lane backwards from Christianity, through the Ages of Reason and Belief, to the Age of Mysticism.

Lord Summerisle: And I refer you again, sir, to the spiritual vision of the Celts. These islanders needed little urging. My grandfather simply told them about the The Stones - how they, in fact, formed an ancient temple - and that he, The Lord of the Manor, would make a sacrifice there every day to their old gods and goddesses, particularly those of fertility and fruitfulness. And as a result of this worship, the barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance. For an atheist, grandfather had a singularly biblical turn of phrase, don't you think?

Lord Summerisle: Well, of course, to begin with they worked for him because he fed them and clothed them but then, when the trees started fruiting, it became a very different matter. The priests told the people to withdraw their labour as they were "trucking with the devil". My father told the people that if they did so, he would leave and the island would become barren again as all the others. It will come as no surprise to you to hear that the old gods defeated the Christian God, and the ministers fled the island, never to return.

Howie: But how did the trees come to fruit, when so many other attempts to grow things on these islands have failed? Don't tell me your grandfather really worshipped the gods of fertility?

Lord Summerisle: Come, come, Sergeant. As I've already told you, he worshipped science. What he did, of course, was to develop new cultivars of hardy fruit suited to local conditions. Out here we have his original experimental orchard, much developed of course. Come and have a look.

Lord Summerisle: You are looking at the parents of the Summerisle apple. Ashmead's Kernel, here on my left, was originally raised by a Doctor Ashmead of Gloucester in the year 1710. It is a grey-brown russet which is not particularly attractive in appearance but was originally selected on account of its age and excellent flavour - superior, many have judged, to the famous Cox's Orange Pippin. Here, see for yourself.

Lord Summerisle: As I say, it has a fine flavour, but its appearance is somewhat against it and it has a regrettable tendency to shrivel in refrigeration. In order to combat this latter disadvantage grandfather crossed it with St Athelstane's Pippin, an orange-flushed russet of great sturdiness and quite phenomenal shelf-life, discovered about 1830 by a Mr Talmage of St Ives in Cornwall. Receptivity to the beneficial effects of the Gulf-Stream, combined with the high resistance to salt water air currents, were bred in at this stage. Note the large, partly open eye with convergent to erect sepals set in a wide, shallow, unusually even basin.

(Summerisle cuts open another apple for Howie and, just as Howie is about to take it, he throws it to the ground)

Lord Summerisle: Don't bother to taste it, it's quite unremarkable, unlike those splendid deep purple-flushed Pauncefoot Pearmains which you can see over there and which were brought in as the last crossing, in order to correct appearance.

(He points out the tree in question and then suddenly produces a huge red apple which he cuts open)

Lord Summerisle: But save your appetite for this feller - the renowned Summerisle Famous.

Howie: Extraordinary, my lord. Naturally I have had them before. Lord Summerisle: Yes, yes, of course you have.

Lord Summerisle: Creamy white flesh, firm, full-flushed, blood-red bloomed skin with a truly noble, sweet, vinous flavour. It took years of my grandfather's and my father's life, but it was worth it, for on this we base our prosperity.

Lord Summerisle: Oh yes. He went on developing and improving the apples and produced other fruit as well, notably Star of Summerisle, a remarkably heady pear, and Flame of Summerisle, an extremely juicy slightly sub-acid apricot of superb colour.

Howie: And did he too keep up the godless charades of your grandfather, sir?

Lord Summerisle: He became fascinated by the old ways, if that's what you mean. Indeed, he went further. What my grandfather started out of expediency, my father continued out of love. He brought me up the same way - to reverence the music and the drama and the rituals of the old gods. To love nature and to fear it and to rely on it and to appease it where necessary. He brought me up...

Lord Summerisle: A heathen conceivably but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.

Howie: Lord Summerisle, I am interested in only one thing - the law. I must remind you, sir, that despite everything you've said, you are the subject of a Christian country. Now, sir, if I may have your permission to exhume the body of Rowan Morrison?

Lord Summerisle: Ah, there's your transport. It's been a great pleasure to meet a Christian copper!

This extra scene occurs after Howie's forced entry into the chemist shop but before he retires to bed.

(As Willow draws the beer, Howie studies the empty space on the wall where last year's harvest festival photograph should have been. He surreptitiously pulls out the copy of the missing photograph he made in the chemist's shop and compares it with the others. He puts the photograph back in his pocket and turns back to the bar)

Howie: Willow, what did you mean by the phrase "the day of death and re-birth"?

Willow: I know where you are. I only hope Ash Buchanan didn't keep you awake. He's a lively boy and very anxious to learn.

Willow: It's just a saying. It's something to do with fertility, and May Day, and all that.

Howie: Willow, what happens on May Day? Does anyone...well, I mean, is anyone specially chosen for a...

Willow: You must think of it as a day of re-birth, Sergeant. That's the best way.

Willow: Who cares? But why don't you come to my room later tonight? I'm sure I can tell you something to your advantage. The door won't be locked.

A major deleted scene: Howie cycles to the edge of the island to interview a girl, Holly Grimmond, who recently stayed with Rowan's mother. In the picture, you can just see Howie parking his bicycle as Mrs Grimmond and Holly wait for him at the top of the steps.

A deleted portion of Howie's meeting with Lord Summerisle, with the laird discussing apple horticulture with Howie in a greenhouse.

"Summerisle bizarrely caresses the apple", but not in the finished cut.

Howie and McTaggart close down a pub on the mainland. The script has such a scene - involving a piano-player and a game of darts - but it doesn't seem to be very close to what is presented here.

This is actor Tony Sympson, having some sort of histrionics as Howie tries to close-down the pub.

This seems to be from a scene straight after the pub scene, above, where Howie and McTaggart arrest a prostitute who is "doing business" in a side-street. The actress is possibly "Katie Gardener", at one time also slated for the part of May Morrison.

This shot appears on in the publicity photographs taken for the film, but what it represents is unclear. The association with the strange and mysterious "fully-clothed suicide scene" (mentioned on page XX of Allan Brown's book) would appear to be a bit optimistic. It is quite possible simply an establishing shot for the mainland scenes.

Howie finds some of "Holly Grimmond's" clothes at the Morrison residence.

Doctor Ewan on his motorbike. This would have been an establishing shot before the existing scene we see in the finished (long) version of the film.

More from The Librarian's encounter with Howie.

Whether these were filmed scenes or just a publicity shots is open to debate.