Wicker Man and Braveheart were the worst ever Scottish films. Really?

The Herald Scotland

4 days ago

But what about the worst Scottish film ever made? I ask because an adaptation of HG Wells's 1898 novel The War Of The Worlds was released last month and is being roundly hailed as possibly the worst film ever made, period. So it has set me thinking about home-grown duds. For the record, The War Of The Worlds stars Ice Cube, has a 3% rating on esteemed movie ranking website Rotten Tomatoes (that's bad) and was described by the critic for Empire magazine as 'misguided movie-making cubed.'
That was one of the kinder reviews, by the way.
An AI overview tells me The Wicker Man and Braveheart are considered by some to be two of the worst Scottish films ever made, though if you flip the question the same algorithm will also cite them as among the best. I do think Braveheart is a terrible film, so I'm happy to propel it into my putative top five Worst Scottish Films Ever, even if most of it was filmed in Ireland.
And I was once very sceptical of The Wicker Man, though having re-watched it recently I now re-cant. It's actually pretty good, despite the accents and the geographical inconsistencies and the haircuts (it really should have a trigger warning). Perversely, I also quite rate Brigadoon, Vincente Minnelli's 1954 musical about a magical Highland village which has long divided opinion and will often feature on the tartan-flecked Worst Of lists.
But mention of Brigadoon begs an important question: what do we even mean by a Scottish film? Bar the subject matter, the only connections Brigadoon has with Scotland are tenuous. Yes, Edinburgh-born Moira Shearer was originally down for a role. Yes, star Gene Kelly did travel to Scotland – but only to confirm what the studio in Los Angeles has already told him, which is that the weather was so bad it made filming here untenable. Other than that, zip.
So by Scottish should we mean films set here or made here – or even made partly here, such as the Spider-Man movie currently filming in Glasgow? Or only films made here by Scottish directors? That would preclude Trainspotting and anything by Ken Loach, to name just a few. Or should it be only films which take a serious look at Scotland and Scottish society, which lets Loach back in and also Andrea Arnold, whose Glasgow-set 2006 film Red Road has a retrospective screening in this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival? And can it include films not made here but which do still feature Scottish directors, in which case might Michael Caton-Jones's Basic Instinct 2 be the worst ever? It has a puny 6% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Final question: is this even a valuable exercise? On one hand, no. Ask anybody who works in Scotland's film industry and they'll tell you it exists in a fragile ecosystem where funding is scarce and where distribution and exhibition are not a given, even if the project is completed. In that context, chucking rocks seems a little, well, uncharitable.
On the other hand, a grown-up country needs to be able to reckon seriously with its cultural output, so if something is rank rotten it needs to be named and shamed. The alternative is that we plonk our heads back in the sand, enjoy guff like The War Of The Worlds and wilfully ignore the McMovies which failed – and the reasons for it.
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Toil and trouble
The Baillie Gifford row rolls on, with a new front opening – this relating to the investment company's links with Israel and with firms supplying arms to that country – and battle re-joined on an old one, the issue of its ties to fossil fuels.
Regarding the first, it's the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) which is now the focus of campaigners' ire. Pressure group Art Workers for Palestine Scotland, part of the wider Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, has issued an open letter signed by 200 people calling for the EIF to go the way of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and cut sponsorship ties with Baillie Gifford. The EIF is holding fast and has also said in response that it does not support a cultural boycott of Israel – though that is exactly what the 200 signatories of another open letter published last week are calling for. Among those adding their names to that one is Irvine Welsh. You can catch him at the book festival on August 22, by the way, when no doubt some or all this will be given an airing.
Meanwhile, following Val McDermid's comments about the authors who first raised the Baillie Gifford question at the 2023 book festival (she called them virtue-signalling, bandwagon-jumping hypocrites) esteemed Scottish poet Don Paterson has now thrown his hat into the ring by means of an essay in Irish literary journal Irish Pages. It has devoted an edition to Scotland and handed editorial control to Paterson and fellow poet Kathleen Jamie. A decade on from the independence referendum, this latest edition is intended as a sort of stock-taking exercise. You know the kind of thing: stands Scotland where it did?, as Macduff asks Ross in Macbeth ('Alas, poor country,' Ross replies, 'almost afraid to know itself').
In his contribution, Paterson describes as 'infantile' the authors who targeted the book festival in 2023, and their line of attack as 'craven' and 'entirely confected.' He describes Baillie Gifford as 'one of the most ecologically responsible investors' and also suggests that some of the protestors were essentially blow-ins – recent arrivals to Scotland – whose 'first major cultural contribution was to trash beautiful things that others had spent decades building.'
Is it just me or is all this reminiscent of another celebrated/infamous essay, Alasdair Gray's Settlers And Colonists, included in 2012 collection Unstated: Writers On Scottish Independence? Gray didn't so much mind the 'settlers', as he termed them, viewing this sort as having a long- or at least medium-term commitment to Scotland's cultural health. But he had little time for the 'colonists' who had taken up positions of authority. His ire was concentrated more on arts administrators than fellow authors who may have recently moved to Scotland, but his comments were still controversial, to say the the least.
Unlike the fire which blazed on Arthur's Seat over the weekend and is now mostly under control, this one looks like it will burn and burn, while pro-Palestine protests such as the one which recently interrupted a Fringe event featuring First Minister John Swinney are also likely to flare up as the festival continues.
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And finally
Only one show in town at the moment and that's Oasis, who played the first of their three Scottish dates at Murrayfield Stadium on Friday and brought thousands of fans to the capital. The Herald's Gabriel Mackay was there for the Saturday night gig and enjoyed a five star show, from opener Hello to the encore closing Champagne Supernova. 'The band sounds huge,' he writers, 'the setlist is bulletproof.'
Elsewhere the Edinburgh Festival continues so The Herald's bevvy of critics have been busy at the indoors stuff which doesn't require a bucket hat or a six-pack. Theatre critic Neil Cooper awards five stars to Karine Polwart for Windblown, a mixture of song and storytelling centred on the felling of a 200-year-old palm tree in the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh. Five stars too for Works And Days, part of the Edinburgh International Festival and performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre by Belgium's FC Bergman company.
Meanwhile at Summerhall he took in a Fringe performance of Ordinary Decent Criminal, 'a relentless solo portrait of the prison underground', and at the Scottish Storytelling Centre he watched When Billy Met Alasdair, an imagining by playwright, performer and all-round man-of-parts Alan Bissett of a meeting between Alasdair Gray and Billy Connolly. Finally at the Traverse he saw Consumed, a new play by Karis Kelly set in Northern Ireland.
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