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The king of the land at his death-time
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xterminal and poliphilo's recommendations and my love for Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth (1972), nineweaving and I watched the 99-minute cut of The Wicker Man (1973) tonight. And maybe I'm just a sucker for holy fools and mummers' dances, but I loved it.
For the life of a man has got a span
He's cut down like the grass
Here's a health unto the green leaf of the tree
For as long as life shall last
—Waterson : Carthy, "May Song"
I do not think The Wicker Man is a horror film. (I do think it reminded me of The Bacchae, The Prisoner, and The Perilous Gard all in one, which is something of an achievement. I would like to have seen it in its original, un-chopped-and-then-patched-up state, but even so, I might still want a copy of my own.* Oh, cinema. Why are you making me so broke?) Nor did the climax leave me stunned—from the title, I'd have been far more disappointed if a sacrificial year-king hadn't surfaced at some point. But in its intelligence, its underpinned myth, and the absolutely consistent world it creates, such that what might otherwise have been a flaky folk revival in the Hebrides instead came across as both otherworldly and very practically rooted, it did surprise me: I like it so much when movies assume their audiences aren't morons.
Or its characters: what gives The Wicker Man much of its tragic dimension is that, from the perspective of the world from which he comes, Edward Woodward's Neil Howie does everything right. He asks all the proper questions, he looks for all the relevant records, he interviews the people who should know the most about the vanished Rowan Morrison, for whose sake he has come to make his investigations on Summerisle. In the face of practices that strike him as bizarre at best, criminal at worst, he holds firm to his principles and props himself up on his faith. Out of his depth, he knows enough to call for help; isolated, he makes a valiant attempt to save the life he sees threatened. All very commendable for a Sergeant of the West Highland Constabulary. From a folkloric perspective, however, he is the equivalent of the promiscuous blonde in a slasher flick who steps into a darkened room to investigate a peculiar noise. An officer of the law who comes with the power of the Crown behind him, a devout Christian who does not believe in premarital sex, a man so convinced of his own rightness that he dashes off like a modern-day knight errant without considering that maybe the damsel is in no distress at all, he is very nearly doomed from the moment he sets foot on Summerisle, and he never knows it.
It is left to the audience to watch the myth tighten around him, as Howie fits himself for the role he has not yet realized is his—"Punch, one of the great fool-victims of history. For you have accepted the role of king for a day, and who but a fool would do that?" For charm, cool intellect, and epigrammatic humor, he hasn't a patch on Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee, even with unfortunate '70's hair), but his attempts to override the man's authority, threatening to charge locals with obstruction or arrest them for conspiracy to murder, locate him squarely in the office of a substitute king. He has chances enough to walk away from this peculiar mystery, and turns each one down until there are none left to take. And like Pentheus in the dress of a maenad, when he finally decides to infiltrate that which fascinates and appalls him, he disguises himself all too appropriately. The more he's tried to stand on his dignity, the more it's been tugged out from under him: his eleventh-hour effort to "search every house in this place" only needs a Benny Hill saxophone to turn it into complete farce as Howie plunges in and out of the houses of Summerisle with neither a warrant nor his wits about him: he barges in on the librarian naked in her bath and apologizes himself out of the room, a bloodstained girl tumbles out of a wardrobe only to laugh at him when he kneels anxiously beside her, half the ladies at the hairdresser's are masked and all stare frostily at him; he takes a pratfall down a flight of stairs and a pair of half-clothed girls run for cover as he picks himself up. He's in such a state when he returns to the Green Man that he promptly downs a glass of whiskey, the first we've seen for the abstemious Sergeant. Before he even picks up Punch's mask, he's a fool already. But the costume seals his consent, however unknowingly he gives it: he has taken up his part and he must play it out to the end.
"I have heard that tale," said the Lady, "and it is not as you say. I will not deny that your Lord paid the teind, nor that it would be good to have had some part in it, for He was a strong man, and born of a race of kings, and His teind must have been a very great one. But that was long ago, long ago in His own time and place. Its strength is spent now. The power has gone out of it."
—Elizabeth Marie Pope, The Perilous Gard (1974)
It's less Howie's Christianity that damns him, of course, than the inflexibility with which he applies his beliefs. In the very first scene of the movie, his assistant McTaggart spots the words JESUS SAVES spray-painted on a wall and cannot resist tweaking his legendarily humorless superior: "Ah, now, there's a message, Sergeant—a message for us all!" To which Howie repressively replies, "However, there is a time and place for everything. Get it removed." No single religion has the market cornered on that brand of literalism. But even if Howie has enough self-perception to refer sarcastically to his piety as "unfashionable," he does not seem able to conceive of any viable alternatives. His tenure on Summerisle is an endless parade of shocks to the system, incredulous and affronted that such customs can still be practiced in the twentieth century. "They never learn anything of Christianity?" he demands of the schoolteacher, who calmly answers, "Only as a comparative religion. The children find it far easier to picture reincarnation than resurrection."
And the religion of Summerisle does work beautifully. As the holdout from pre-Christian times that it first appears, it's a little overstuffed and mismatched, with corn dollies and blue-eyed boats alongside stone circles and topiary herms, but as a late Victorian syncretism it's more than believable—Frazer's Golden Bough by way of Thomas Huxley, now with additional guising. Nor is there the underlying wrongness that characterizes so many horror-film communities. No one on Summerisle is a dead-eyed zombie. The children are bright and healthy, the adults friendly and devout, the graves are planted with namesake trees and nine-year-olds still paint with watercolors, three generations in and no cultlike crack-up in sight. Girls leap over fires in hopes of conceiving and pregnant women touch blossoming trees for luck and a mother tells her daughter that a frog will take away her sore throat, but there is a doctor on the island and in all their commerce with the mainland, Summerisle never seems to have come to blows over its unconventional traditions. I will grant that Lord Summerisle is no Thomas Colpeper—in his dryly amused observation of Howie and his knowledge that the island's paganism dates back only as far as his inventive grandfather, he seems less a true believer than a man who knows which side of the apple his bread is buttered on. "A heathen, conceivably. But not, I hope, an unenlightened one." But he takes seriously his role as priest: he may not always believe in what he does, but I do not think he's entirely prepared to claim it isn't real, either. The sacrifice is as normal and joyous an affair as a wedding, with a village band and hymn-singing. All the darkness comes from the oldest, truest places: the earth, love, the turn of the seasons; the terrible possibility that the God to whom you cry out is not the one who's really out there after all.
Pentheus has had his run. Now the god will play with him. Yet it is not Dionysos who by himself has devised that game like a cruel child. It takes two to play. The god is that which is. If we will not know him, it is we who make the ironies the immortals laugh at.
—Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo (1966)
What I cannot help wondering is how differently the second half of the film might have turned out if Howie had yielded to Willow. She is the initiator of virgins: his first night on Summerisle, Howie witnesses an adolescent boy brought to her as "a sacrifice for Aphrodite" while downstairs in the pub a sweetly sensuous, ceremonious ballad leaves no doubt as to what the soft gasps and laughter from the next room mean.** I put my hand on her thigh and she says, do you want to try? I put my hand on her belly and she says, do you want to fill me? Gently, gently, Johnny, my jingalo. A virgin Howie most certainly is, to the contemptuous amusement of his coworkers back on the mainland and the somewhat more religious interest of the islanders, and the second night Willow is at his door. Heigh ho, who is there? No one but me, my dear. Please come, say how do—the things I'll give to you! Sirenlike, she sings the policeman blind and half demented with desire until he flattens himself desperately against the wall as though only the plaster between them keeps him from collapsing into her arms. But he does not open his door to her, and the music fades away, and he remains a virgin, and the next day is May Day.
I do not know whether her song is meant to torment him, or test him, or whether she is offering him a genuine invitation into the community of Summerisle. Certainly sleeping with Willow would have disqualified him as a sacrifice, because an important component of his suitability is his virginity—both physically and the arrogant innocence that allows him not to understand until it's far too late that not all the world bows down to his God and his laws. But I notice also that for all his disdain for these "circumstances of pagan barbarity" in which he finds himself, Sergeant Howie has a remarkably intuitive grasp of their mechanics. It is not the highly ritualized atmosphere of Summerisle that is alien to him, only the patterns into which their faith is channeled. The moment he sees the photograph of Rowan Morrison surrounded by the scanty, disastrous harvest over which she presided, he understands why she would make such an appropriate sacrifice for the next year's fertility: "Well, that's it: the crops failed. And it's Rowan—Rowan and the crops failed!" His researches in the town library have not told him what happens when the substitute king is not enough, but he shouts unerringly at the island's lord, "If the crops fail, Summerisle, next year your people will kill you on May Day!" I am not convinced that he could have made the transition from Scottish Puritanism to kitchen-sink neopaganism, for all the reasons mentioned earlier. (Nor do I have any idea where the islanders would have found an acceptable sacrifice if he had opted out.) But he is not a stupid man, and he comprehends this strange world into which he's stumbled far more readily than I think he would ever like to admit.
I could go on—about the music, the characterization, the folklore, the complexities on both sides of the religion, and the fact that no other film I've ever seen has made the mating of snails so unsettlingly seductive.*** But it is past five in the morning, and I really need to sleep. There may be more tomorrow.
At the very least, I need to buy the soundtrack. "Gently, Johnny" won't get out of my head.
*This impressively comprehensive site lists the differences between the various extant versions of The Wicker Man, including scenes that have been almost certainly lost. I'll still pray for them to turn up somewhere in a canister or a shoebox in the back room of a studio. I don't mind so much the shortening of Howie's first conversation with Lord Summerisle, because on reflection I actually prefer the apple handed over and eaten in ellipsis, so that the audience has to look to catch the symbolism—whether it's Eve or Persephone, it is never a good idea to take fruit from someone unless you know what you're accepting along with it—but I am sorry not to have the interchange with the schoolteacher, because it allows the audience to see a little more of Howie than his uprightness and uptightness (he's read Don Quixote; that's always a point in a person's favor) as well as the real disparity between the role in which he thinks he's come to Summerisle and the role the islanders know he's about to play. Likewise the exchange between the two fishermen at the beginning, because even as a one-liner it adds plausibility to Howie's disappearance: if he's not well-liked, who'll make the effort to search for him? Oh, well, such a shame; now who's for another round of drinks? The pub stays open tonight!
**While it is never mentioned in the film, bothnineweaving and I independently received the impression that just as Willow in her role as "the goddess of love in human form" sexually initiates the boys of the island, it must be the Lord Summerisle who initiates the girls.
***I am entirely serious. While the boy Ash makes love for the first time with Willow upstairs, the pub-goers do not sing raucously as they did for "The Landlord's Daughter," the bawdy praise of Willow's charms that should have warned Sergeant Howie he was in no ordinary pub, but quietly, half ritual, half reminiscence, gently as Johnny in the song. They lean against one another, they share voices. They are accompanying the boy's entry into the sexual world and it is hallowed. On his knees beside his bed, Howie finds his prayers disturbed by the meditative, slightly mocking voice of Lord Summerisle, as he watches two snails glide over one another on a leaf, glistening in the windowlight, abandoned and sinless as the couples Howie glimpsed earlier in the ruins of the churchyard. "I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick, discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another, or to one of his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable—or unhappy—all over the earth." And the singers' voices sway and fall like a chant that could go on forever, and the boy moans in the arms of his goddess, and Howie knots his hands together so tightly he'll have nail-marks on his knuckles in the morning. But aren't stigmata every martyr's dream? He's not the villain of this story, and perhaps therein lies his problem. He is only a very different sort of hero than he imagined.
xterminal and poliphilo's recommendations and my love for Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth (1972), nineweaving and I watched the 99-minute cut of The Wicker Man (1973) tonight. And maybe I'm just a sucker for holy fools and mummers' dances, but I loved it.For the life of a man has got a span
He's cut down like the grass
Here's a health unto the green leaf of the tree
For as long as life shall last
—Waterson : Carthy, "May Song"
I do not think The Wicker Man is a horror film. (I do think it reminded me of The Bacchae, The Prisoner, and The Perilous Gard all in one, which is something of an achievement. I would like to have seen it in its original, un-chopped-and-then-patched-up state, but even so, I might still want a copy of my own.* Oh, cinema. Why are you making me so broke?) Nor did the climax leave me stunned—from the title, I'd have been far more disappointed if a sacrificial year-king hadn't surfaced at some point. But in its intelligence, its underpinned myth, and the absolutely consistent world it creates, such that what might otherwise have been a flaky folk revival in the Hebrides instead came across as both otherworldly and very practically rooted, it did surprise me: I like it so much when movies assume their audiences aren't morons.
Or its characters: what gives The Wicker Man much of its tragic dimension is that, from the perspective of the world from which he comes, Edward Woodward's Neil Howie does everything right. He asks all the proper questions, he looks for all the relevant records, he interviews the people who should know the most about the vanished Rowan Morrison, for whose sake he has come to make his investigations on Summerisle. In the face of practices that strike him as bizarre at best, criminal at worst, he holds firm to his principles and props himself up on his faith. Out of his depth, he knows enough to call for help; isolated, he makes a valiant attempt to save the life he sees threatened. All very commendable for a Sergeant of the West Highland Constabulary. From a folkloric perspective, however, he is the equivalent of the promiscuous blonde in a slasher flick who steps into a darkened room to investigate a peculiar noise. An officer of the law who comes with the power of the Crown behind him, a devout Christian who does not believe in premarital sex, a man so convinced of his own rightness that he dashes off like a modern-day knight errant without considering that maybe the damsel is in no distress at all, he is very nearly doomed from the moment he sets foot on Summerisle, and he never knows it.
It is left to the audience to watch the myth tighten around him, as Howie fits himself for the role he has not yet realized is his—"Punch, one of the great fool-victims of history. For you have accepted the role of king for a day, and who but a fool would do that?" For charm, cool intellect, and epigrammatic humor, he hasn't a patch on Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee, even with unfortunate '70's hair), but his attempts to override the man's authority, threatening to charge locals with obstruction or arrest them for conspiracy to murder, locate him squarely in the office of a substitute king. He has chances enough to walk away from this peculiar mystery, and turns each one down until there are none left to take. And like Pentheus in the dress of a maenad, when he finally decides to infiltrate that which fascinates and appalls him, he disguises himself all too appropriately. The more he's tried to stand on his dignity, the more it's been tugged out from under him: his eleventh-hour effort to "search every house in this place" only needs a Benny Hill saxophone to turn it into complete farce as Howie plunges in and out of the houses of Summerisle with neither a warrant nor his wits about him: he barges in on the librarian naked in her bath and apologizes himself out of the room, a bloodstained girl tumbles out of a wardrobe only to laugh at him when he kneels anxiously beside her, half the ladies at the hairdresser's are masked and all stare frostily at him; he takes a pratfall down a flight of stairs and a pair of half-clothed girls run for cover as he picks himself up. He's in such a state when he returns to the Green Man that he promptly downs a glass of whiskey, the first we've seen for the abstemious Sergeant. Before he even picks up Punch's mask, he's a fool already. But the costume seals his consent, however unknowingly he gives it: he has taken up his part and he must play it out to the end.
"I have heard that tale," said the Lady, "and it is not as you say. I will not deny that your Lord paid the teind, nor that it would be good to have had some part in it, for He was a strong man, and born of a race of kings, and His teind must have been a very great one. But that was long ago, long ago in His own time and place. Its strength is spent now. The power has gone out of it."
—Elizabeth Marie Pope, The Perilous Gard (1974)
It's less Howie's Christianity that damns him, of course, than the inflexibility with which he applies his beliefs. In the very first scene of the movie, his assistant McTaggart spots the words JESUS SAVES spray-painted on a wall and cannot resist tweaking his legendarily humorless superior: "Ah, now, there's a message, Sergeant—a message for us all!" To which Howie repressively replies, "However, there is a time and place for everything. Get it removed." No single religion has the market cornered on that brand of literalism. But even if Howie has enough self-perception to refer sarcastically to his piety as "unfashionable," he does not seem able to conceive of any viable alternatives. His tenure on Summerisle is an endless parade of shocks to the system, incredulous and affronted that such customs can still be practiced in the twentieth century. "They never learn anything of Christianity?" he demands of the schoolteacher, who calmly answers, "Only as a comparative religion. The children find it far easier to picture reincarnation than resurrection."
And the religion of Summerisle does work beautifully. As the holdout from pre-Christian times that it first appears, it's a little overstuffed and mismatched, with corn dollies and blue-eyed boats alongside stone circles and topiary herms, but as a late Victorian syncretism it's more than believable—Frazer's Golden Bough by way of Thomas Huxley, now with additional guising. Nor is there the underlying wrongness that characterizes so many horror-film communities. No one on Summerisle is a dead-eyed zombie. The children are bright and healthy, the adults friendly and devout, the graves are planted with namesake trees and nine-year-olds still paint with watercolors, three generations in and no cultlike crack-up in sight. Girls leap over fires in hopes of conceiving and pregnant women touch blossoming trees for luck and a mother tells her daughter that a frog will take away her sore throat, but there is a doctor on the island and in all their commerce with the mainland, Summerisle never seems to have come to blows over its unconventional traditions. I will grant that Lord Summerisle is no Thomas Colpeper—in his dryly amused observation of Howie and his knowledge that the island's paganism dates back only as far as his inventive grandfather, he seems less a true believer than a man who knows which side of the apple his bread is buttered on. "A heathen, conceivably. But not, I hope, an unenlightened one." But he takes seriously his role as priest: he may not always believe in what he does, but I do not think he's entirely prepared to claim it isn't real, either. The sacrifice is as normal and joyous an affair as a wedding, with a village band and hymn-singing. All the darkness comes from the oldest, truest places: the earth, love, the turn of the seasons; the terrible possibility that the God to whom you cry out is not the one who's really out there after all.
Pentheus has had his run. Now the god will play with him. Yet it is not Dionysos who by himself has devised that game like a cruel child. It takes two to play. The god is that which is. If we will not know him, it is we who make the ironies the immortals laugh at.
—Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo (1966)
What I cannot help wondering is how differently the second half of the film might have turned out if Howie had yielded to Willow. She is the initiator of virgins: his first night on Summerisle, Howie witnesses an adolescent boy brought to her as "a sacrifice for Aphrodite" while downstairs in the pub a sweetly sensuous, ceremonious ballad leaves no doubt as to what the soft gasps and laughter from the next room mean.** I put my hand on her thigh and she says, do you want to try? I put my hand on her belly and she says, do you want to fill me? Gently, gently, Johnny, my jingalo. A virgin Howie most certainly is, to the contemptuous amusement of his coworkers back on the mainland and the somewhat more religious interest of the islanders, and the second night Willow is at his door. Heigh ho, who is there? No one but me, my dear. Please come, say how do—the things I'll give to you! Sirenlike, she sings the policeman blind and half demented with desire until he flattens himself desperately against the wall as though only the plaster between them keeps him from collapsing into her arms. But he does not open his door to her, and the music fades away, and he remains a virgin, and the next day is May Day.
I do not know whether her song is meant to torment him, or test him, or whether she is offering him a genuine invitation into the community of Summerisle. Certainly sleeping with Willow would have disqualified him as a sacrifice, because an important component of his suitability is his virginity—both physically and the arrogant innocence that allows him not to understand until it's far too late that not all the world bows down to his God and his laws. But I notice also that for all his disdain for these "circumstances of pagan barbarity" in which he finds himself, Sergeant Howie has a remarkably intuitive grasp of their mechanics. It is not the highly ritualized atmosphere of Summerisle that is alien to him, only the patterns into which their faith is channeled. The moment he sees the photograph of Rowan Morrison surrounded by the scanty, disastrous harvest over which she presided, he understands why she would make such an appropriate sacrifice for the next year's fertility: "Well, that's it: the crops failed. And it's Rowan—Rowan and the crops failed!" His researches in the town library have not told him what happens when the substitute king is not enough, but he shouts unerringly at the island's lord, "If the crops fail, Summerisle, next year your people will kill you on May Day!" I am not convinced that he could have made the transition from Scottish Puritanism to kitchen-sink neopaganism, for all the reasons mentioned earlier. (Nor do I have any idea where the islanders would have found an acceptable sacrifice if he had opted out.) But he is not a stupid man, and he comprehends this strange world into which he's stumbled far more readily than I think he would ever like to admit.
I could go on—about the music, the characterization, the folklore, the complexities on both sides of the religion, and the fact that no other film I've ever seen has made the mating of snails so unsettlingly seductive.*** But it is past five in the morning, and I really need to sleep. There may be more tomorrow.
At the very least, I need to buy the soundtrack. "Gently, Johnny" won't get out of my head.
*This impressively comprehensive site lists the differences between the various extant versions of The Wicker Man, including scenes that have been almost certainly lost. I'll still pray for them to turn up somewhere in a canister or a shoebox in the back room of a studio. I don't mind so much the shortening of Howie's first conversation with Lord Summerisle, because on reflection I actually prefer the apple handed over and eaten in ellipsis, so that the audience has to look to catch the symbolism—whether it's Eve or Persephone, it is never a good idea to take fruit from someone unless you know what you're accepting along with it—but I am sorry not to have the interchange with the schoolteacher, because it allows the audience to see a little more of Howie than his uprightness and uptightness (he's read Don Quixote; that's always a point in a person's favor) as well as the real disparity between the role in which he thinks he's come to Summerisle and the role the islanders know he's about to play. Likewise the exchange between the two fishermen at the beginning, because even as a one-liner it adds plausibility to Howie's disappearance: if he's not well-liked, who'll make the effort to search for him? Oh, well, such a shame; now who's for another round of drinks? The pub stays open tonight!
**While it is never mentioned in the film, both
nineweaving and I independently received the impression that just as Willow in her role as "the goddess of love in human form" sexually initiates the boys of the island, it must be the Lord Summerisle who initiates the girls.***I am entirely serious. While the boy Ash makes love for the first time with Willow upstairs, the pub-goers do not sing raucously as they did for "The Landlord's Daughter," the bawdy praise of Willow's charms that should have warned Sergeant Howie he was in no ordinary pub, but quietly, half ritual, half reminiscence, gently as Johnny in the song. They lean against one another, they share voices. They are accompanying the boy's entry into the sexual world and it is hallowed. On his knees beside his bed, Howie finds his prayers disturbed by the meditative, slightly mocking voice of Lord Summerisle, as he watches two snails glide over one another on a leaf, glistening in the windowlight, abandoned and sinless as the couples Howie glimpsed earlier in the ruins of the churchyard. "I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick, discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another, or to one of his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable—or unhappy—all over the earth." And the singers' voices sway and fall like a chant that could go on forever, and the boy moans in the arms of his goddess, and Howie knots his hands together so tightly he'll have nail-marks on his knuckles in the morning. But aren't stigmata every martyr's dream? He's not the villain of this story, and perhaps therein lies his problem. He is only a very different sort of hero than he imagined.
no subject
Every religion has its, erm, orthodox adherents (and converts tend to be the most orthodox of all); it seems to me he'd have just been trading one set of strictures for another. After all, he already sees the religion they profess as ... not confining, but... can't think of the right word. Tunnel vision will do that to ya.
Even this version? It was released from studio tapes in 2002.
Interesting! Different track list than the version I scored a couple of years ago, so it's definitely a different disc... I'll be on the lookout for this to see if it really is the holy grail.
Although "Corn Rigs and Barley Rigs" does not appear with its traditional tune; I had been hoping.
Well, you have to appease the folky kids an' all that. At least it does appear in the 99-minute cut (if I recall correctly, it gets VERY short shrift in the theatrical release).
I really did like how the audience was not hit over the head with the finale:
That's it: we're not hit over the head with anything (except Britt Eklund, and really, how awful is that?). That's what the remake-- and so very, very many other movies-- completely fail to grasp. That we can figure it out on our own.
no subject
Oh, yes.
After all, he already sees the religion they profess as ... not confining, but... can't think of the right word.
It is a very closed system. Which makes sense: it's not an organic development, although I imagine much more so now than two generations ago.
Different track list than the version I scored a couple of years ago, so it's definitely a different disc... I'll be on the lookout for this to see if it really is the holy grail.
I am contemplating its purchase anyway. If I get to it before you do, shall I send you a copy?
That's what the remake-- and so very, very many other movies-- completely fail to grasp.
Well, the remake sounded like it failed on a whole number of levels . . .
no subject
That would be wonderful of you, thanks!
Well, the remake sounded like it failed on a whole number of levels . . .
As it succeeded on none, that is an accurate assessment of the situation.
no subject
Well, tell me—or if it's at least reasonably close. And if so, the entire soundtrack's yours.
"Gently, Johnny"
"Maypole Song"
"The Tinker of Rye"
"Willow's Song"
no subject
Sneaker Pimps - "Johnny" (http://www.sendspace.com/file/vqbdq9)
no subject
Thanks!