Several clips from a 1953 filming of the Padstow, Cornwall, May Day “hobby horse” procession are available on the Web. The film was made by Peter Kennedy, George Pickow, and Alan Lomax, an American folklorist.
Some .wmv selections are here.
But the best clip is here, especially for its slightly eerie, archetypal ending, which some people say prefigures The Seventh Seal. UPDATE: This last link no longer works.
Even though it was billed as a horror film, and even though no one whom I knew ever endorsed the ending, the 1973 movie The Wicker Man still inspired many of us who were then in the Pagan movement. We loved the idea of a place like Summerisle, a functioning society based on Pagan principles.
The new version that’s in the works, starring Nicholas Cage as the interfering policeman and directed by Neil LaBute, moves the island from the Scottish coast to Puget Sound.
But the remake lacks the tension of the original, says this script reviewer.
My problems with this draft all stem from the changes made to the main character. Malus isn’t anywhere near as intense or conflicted as Howie; indeed, compared to him, Malus is a relative dork. He is allergic to bee stings and carries his bee sting kit with him when he travels to SummerIsle (along with his rosary beads and self-help tapes). He is a California cop out removed to this isolated Washington community. His very modern manner contrasts with the simplicity of the locals; think Witness but if it were remade as horror-lite.
This island community produces honey rather than apples. The cop’s name, Malus (rather than Howie as in the original), is the botanical genus for apples–a little tribute to the original.
Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.
Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.
But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.
They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.
For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?