Willow's Song - Magnet
- May 4
- 3 min read
Updated: May 6
When I was eighteen, the first "X" film I legally saw in a cinema was Nicholas Roeg's terrifying "Don't Look Now". In those days - 1973 in this case - going to the cinema meant watching a whole programme as well as the "feature film" usually comprising a "newsreel", and current affairs magazine feature (usually "Look at Life" and a "support" movie, also known as a "B" movie. Usually when you went to the cinema you didn't even know what the "B" movie was going to be, and this was no exception. What I saw in 1973 as the support to "Don't Look Now" was "The Wicker Man" in what was arguably the best double feature of all time.
Since1983, the fishing and resort town of Hastings in Sussex has celebrated the beginning of May with its "Jack-in-the-Green" festival and is now probably the UK's most well-known and long running "Jack" event, attracting thousands of visitors each year. The event now lasts for four days, culminating in the "Jack-in-the-Green" parade on the May Bank Holiday Monday. One of the endearing annual features of the festival is the showing of "The Wicker Man" at the independent Electric Palace cinema in Hastings Old Town.
The film is centred round the May Day festivities on a remote Scottish island called Summerisle. The protagonist is a Scottish policeman played by Edward Woodward, who has been sent over from the mainland to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. (If you haven't seen the film and wish to, look away now as a spoiler is coming) As he makes his enquiries it becomes more and more apparent that he is being led a merry dance by the islanders who are setting him up as the sacrifice for their forthcoming May Day festivities. In a famous sequence, a local lass, Willow MacGregor, attempts to find out if he's a virgin by trying to lure him to her bed. During this scene she sings a gently seductive song known, appropriately enough, as "Willow's Song".
Willow is played by Brit Ekland, although, as a genuine Scottish accent was understandably beyond Ekland's Swedish capacity, she was voiced by jazz singer Annie Ross. To confuse things further, Willow's Song is actually sung by singer and actress Rachel Verney. A further twist is that for this scene, as Ekland was pregnant and her character was naked, they used a body double, generally identified as actress Lorraine Peters, although some sources claim it was a girl from the area called Jane Jackson, others that is was a strip tease artist name of Helen Wallace.
The composer of the film music was Paul Giovanni (picture above), an American polymath, who was a director of plays and a playwright, an actor, and a performer and composer of music. He is now most renowned as the composer of the soundtrack of "The Wicker Man", and, in particular of "Willow's Song". He died young, aged 57, of pneumonia complicated by HIV/AIDS.
Magnet was a group of musicians hired specifically to record the soundtrack. They only exist in the context of the film, uniquely realising Giovanni's meld of traditional folk tunes with a Baltic romantic classical sensibility which gives the music and indeed, the whole film, an ethereal, otherworldly air, none moreso than in "Willow's Song".
Ingrid Pitt, the greatest Hammer Horror actress, was in the film as the island's librarian. During production, she had a short affair with the producer, Peter Snell, which allegedly was the reason why the film wasn't released as an "A" movie in its own right, her second and then current husband being the vindictive George Pinches, Head of Cinema Bookings for UK film distributors the Rank Organisation at the time.
Curiously, Pitt's third husband, ex racing driver Tony Rudlin, moved to Hastings shortly after her death in 2012. I had the good fortune to meet with him when he was in the planning stages of an Ingrid Pitt Queen of Horror Festival and his front room was a veritable shrine to Pitt, the bookshelves full of her books and novels, the mantlepiece almost collapsing under the weight of photos of her, with nothing in sight referring to his own far from obscure glory days with the Lotus Formula One Grand Prix team.
Riddle sequence to be rendered only when drunk:
Q: What do you call a man with a wooden head
A: Edward.
Q: What do you call a man with two wooden heads?
A: Edward Wood.
Q: What do you call a man with three wooden heads?
A: Edward Woodward.
Q: Why does "Edward Woodward"'s name have so many "d"s in it?
A: Because it would sound pretty silly if his name was "Eee-wah Wooh-wooh!"
It's the way you tell 'em.
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