Edward Woodward

The thing about October, and trying to do Horrorween every year, is that I’m not a huge horror movie fan. We’ll go backward through Edward Woodward’s IMDb as an example. I’ve probably seen his Lone Gunman but not in ages. I’ve seen Breaker Morant, though I had to go through my old Rotten Tomatoes reviews to find out what I thought about it, because I didn’t remember. I’ve seen The Wicker Man, thirty years ago, long enough ago that I don’t remember if I saw all of it. And I’ve seen Becket, where he’s the last person on the IMDb page because he’s uncredited and, well, his last name was Woodward.

So yeah. Woodward has made it to the schedule because he’s iconic. That’s great. I should cover iconic people regardless of my familiarity with their work. I try to cover the widest range of people possible, from people with no Wikipedia page where I have to dig my way through the specific Wiki for some property I barely know myself to we’ve got our annual “How did it take so long to get to them?” coming up in two weeks. Woodward is probably closer to the latter for horror fans, all things considered.

And don’t get me wrong; Sergeant Howie is an iconic role. Even I who have not seen the movie since the mid-’90s agree with that. He is, quite frankly, a horrible figure. Is he the hero? No; I don’t think there are any heroes in The Wicker Man, which is one of the things the remake doesn’t quite manage properly. Sergeant Howie is small and narrow-minded and is doubtless the sort of person who thinks the UK would be better off with those pesky foreigners. You don’t want to hear his opinion on the existence of synagogues and mosques, even.

While the role is all a lot of people know him from, he did do a lot of other noteworthy things. Callan had just ended when The Wicker Man was made. Breaker Morant, his other deeply iconic film role and one I’m actually more interested in revisiting. And The Equalizer, making him the whitest, malest person to basically share a role with Queen Latifah. Presumably The Wicker Man is what got him the Hot Fuzz role, but I haven’t seen Hot Fuzz, either.

Do I have time to watch everything that makes people iconic before writing about them? I’m going to level with you; I do not. My impostor syndrome is bad enough about these columns without pretending I’ve seen them, though. It’s clear from a brief glance at IMDb and Wikipedia that Woodward was one of the strongest figures of stage and screen for a long time, and there’s a level to which just reminding you that he exists feels important. And now you have five whole paragraphs of vamping!