Bill Forsyth (1983)
I was in Edinburgh for just three evenings of this year’s twelve-day film festival so very lucky to coincide with a single special showing of Local Hero – not only my favourite Scottish film but also the most emotionally potent comedy I know. I guess I’d seen it four or five times before but never with a predominantly Scottish audience. The Q&A with Bill Forsyth that followed the screening was a major extra privilege. The seats at the Filmhouse on Lothian Road were unallocated and queues formed on the staircases to Screen 1 – an opportunity to observe the make-up of the audience more carefully than I usually do: grey heads dominated but there were plenty of youngsters too. After the screening, hardly a single person left until the Q&A, which lasted a good forty minutes, was over. There seemed to be a shared realisation of good fortune at being present, a shared understanding of Local Hero’s importance in Scottish cinema history – though those pompous words misrepresent Bill Forsyth’s beautiful work. It’s the least grandiose picture imaginable, a casual classic.
The story of Local Hero was a contemporary one when the film first appeared. ‘Mac’ MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), a highflying executive in an energy conglomerate based in Houston, Texas, is sent to the west coast of Scotland to purchase the (fictional) village of Ferness and its coastline[1], the intended site for a North Sea oil refinery. Mac isn’t thrilled with the assignment: he’s an acquisitions and mergers whizz who prefers doing business by phone and telex rather than face to face. He can’t argue, however: he’s been chosen for the job by Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), the head of Knox Oil and Gas. A few things in these early scenes give a foretaste of the distinctively wry comedy to follow. The eccentric Happer selects MacIntyre because he assumes him to be Scottish; Mac tells his colleague Cal (John Jackson) that his immigrant parents adopted the name MacIntyre, assuming it was an American one, when they arrived in the US from Hungary. Mac’s ethnicity is in any case of secondary interest to his boss, whose own name somehow connotes both lucky chance and martinet caprice. Felix Happer has a passion for astronomy (and a planetarium in his vast office). In a briefing meeting, he gives Mac barely a word of advice about the deal that he’s expected to close. He instructs him instead to keep an eye on the night sky above Ferness and to let him know immediately if anything unusual occurs up there.
Happer is the most decidedly starry-eyed materialist in evidence but the film is replete with self-interested romantics. Danny Oldsen (Peter Capaldi), who works in Knox’s Scottish office, accompanies Mac to Ferness. Before they start their road trip there, they visit a Knox research facility in Aberdeen (Rikki Fulton and Alex Norton are boffins there). From this moment on, Danny is smitten with Marina (Jenny Seagrove), a marine research scientist who, to his delight, prefers to work in ‘the field’, ie the sea at Ferness. The Soviet trawler captain Victor (Christopher Rozycki) is a more occasional visitor there. His nationality belies his vigorous capitalism. His sentimental ballad (‘Lone Star Man’) is a high point of the all-night ceilidh that is, in every sense, central to Local Hero. The apparently typical business executive Mac proves to be the biggest romantic of the lot. He gradually falls in love with Ferness and at least imagines that he’s fallen in love too with Stella (Jennifer Black), a married woman in the village. Her husband is Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson) – no more than arguably the film’s title character but the man who Mac, in his cups, declares he wants to be. The multi-talented Gordon, as well as running Ferness’s inn with his wife, is a qualified accountant, the villagers’ de facto leader in negotiations with Knox, an enthusiastic lover and, when he joins a band for one of their numbers at the ceilidh, no mean accordion player.
Mac’s feelings for his new environment are developed quietly, persuasively and irrefutably: as Forsyth said in the Q&A, the changes wrought in him are the result of osmosis rather than definite dramatic events. Local Hero, the tale of an alien in what was mistakenly thought to be his native land, concludes with a piercing affirmation of home being where the heart is. Mac, at Happer’s command, returns to his high-rise apartment in Houston. He takes from his coat pocket some shells he collected on the Scottish seashore and places them, denatured, on a sleek work surface. He pins up a few photos from his trip, including one of Stella. Bill Forsyth may be light years away from Tennessee Williams but, in the circumstances, you can’t help thinking ‘Stella for star!’ Mac goes out onto his balcony and contemplates a constellation of city lights. In Ferness, Mac had to rely, for communication with Knox, on the village’s lone red telephone box. Forsyth finally cuts back from Houston to a shot of this. The phone is ringing.
The Houston prologue is a shade overemphatic in establishing the noise, heat and pressure of the city and Mac’s workplace, as a contrast with what will follow. There’s a nice sight gag: people in the Knox offices, standing only a few feet apart, use the phone to talk, looking at each other through glass partitions. But Local Hero really hits its stride only once Mac arrives in Scotland, during his and Danny’s long road journey to Ferness, protracted by the highland mist that forces them to spend a night in the car. The journey’s length is the means whereby the narrative, like the protagonist, moves into a new terrain and time zone. Once Mac and Danny arrive in the village, the set, choreographed jokes of the Houston sequences have given way to Forsyth’s more characteristic glancing humour. Chris Menges’s masterly lighting will go on to capture extraordinary seascapes, sunsets and twilights; on the car journey, it imparts to the landscape a novelty verging on the faery (there’s a faint flavour of Brigadoon). Later in the story, Forsyth nudges the enchanted quality of the setting in a light-heartedly supernatural direction. On one of the rare occasions that Marina is on dry land, Danny admiringly caresses one of her feet and discovers that it has webbed toes. The last we see of Marina as she dives underwater near the end of the film is a mermaid’s tail.
An abundant supply of off-centre details, some lightly connected, enriches the comic texture. A few examples … Ferness hardly suffers from heavy traffic but people repeatedly have to avoid a speeding motorbike. A dog always takes its time to move, even when a car toots at it. Danny hits a rabbit during the drive to the village. Mac names her Trudy (for his latest ex-girlfriend in Houston). She convalesces in Mac’s room at the Urquharts’ inn but Trudy ends up as the visitors’ evening meal. They’ve nearly cleared their plates before they realise. An unmoved Gordon insists it was the humane thing to do: the creature’s leg was broken – ‘Check the bones if you don’t believe me’. A crying baby in a buggy is regularly accompanied by a group of local men. Which one is the baby’s father remains a mystery. The boat painter Gideon (David Mowat) knows what he wants when it comes to lettering a name on the side of the craft. His spelling isn’t always correct but he gets ‘Silver Dollar’ right. When he’s asked ‘Are you sure there are two Ls in dollar?’ his testy answer is, ‘Aye, and are there two Gs in bugger off?’
Gideon also rejects Mac’s amiable suggestion of a white dollar sign instead of words but the villagers, once negotiations are underway, aren’t averse to making their fortune through compensation payments and a slice of oil revenues. As Gordon puts it to Victor on the latter’s arrival in Ferness, ‘We won’t have anywhere to call home, but we’ll be stinking rich’. The opposition of canny natives and big business naturally calls to mind a David and Goliath contest from an Ealing comedy (and, thanks to the geographical setting, Whisky Galore! in particular[2]) but in Local Hero both sides are thwarted – albeit that a particular canny native plays a big part in this. Ben Knox (Fulton Mackay) is an elderly beachcomber who lives in a shack on the seashore. He owns the beach through a deed of gift granted to his ancestors from the Lord of the Isles and doesn’t want to move. (The discovery of this ancient document recalls another famous Ealing film, Passport to Pimlico.) Ben may also be part of the Knox family from whom Felix Happer’s forebears acquired the business that made their fortune. The climax to negotiations occurs when Happer himself arrives on the scene and conducts (off-camera) discussions with the beachcomber in his shack. Ben, an experienced stargazer, impresses Happer, who abandons the idea of the oil refinery on Ferness and decides instead on an astronomical observatory in combination with – at Danny’s eager suggestion – an oceanographic research facility that will make Marina’s dreams a reality. ‘Institute for the study of sky and sea – I like it …,’ says Happer. Danny is shamelessly ingratiating: ‘You could call it the Happer Institute, sir?’ Happer likes that too. Mac’s time in Ferness comes to an abrupt end, when he’s dispatched back to Houston to implement the new plans.
This well worked out conclusion is also the summation of Bill Forsyth’s balancing act in Local Hero, in which mercenary motives and putting number one first are made fun of and appealing. The happy ending of a boost to scientific research at the expense of commercial depredations is thanks largely to Ben Knox’s cussedness and to Felix Happer’s whims of iron and big-picture vanity[3]. Underlying this lack of sentimentality is the authentic melancholy of Mac’s return to normal life. Mark Knopfler’s score, barely noticeable at first, makes a huge contribution to the film’s growing emotive power. The music he wrote for the pivotal ceilidh scenes is just as important as the alcohol consumed in them in encapsulating Mac’s intoxication. By the time Knopfler’s main theme succeeds the yearning ringing from the village phone box and continues through the closing credits, the effect is overwhelming.
Burt Lancaster’s fee (according to Wikipedia) accounted for a third of the film’s entire £3 million budget but Forsyth did well to cast him. (He did so after reading a magazine interview, in which Lancaster expressed regret at how little comedy he’d done in his career.) It’s a pity most of Lancaster’s Houston scenes are with Happer’s mad psychotherapist Moritz (Norman Chancer), who might be funny in smaller doses but who, with the screen time he gets, is the one misjudged element of the film. (In the EIFF Q&A, Forsyth explained that Norman Chancer’s casting as Moritz was a last-minute change, the result of visa problems with the original choice. Forsyth is evidently a polite fellow but this sounded like a tactful acknowledgement that Chancer’s Moritz didn’t work as intended.) Once he crosses the Atlantic, however, Burt Lancaster is terrific. Happer arrives in a helicopter, its lights seen in the night sky – just right for the entry of the Hollywood star: Lancaster’s larger-than-life presence in little Ferness makes complete sense. No less important, his size, power and distinctive vocal delivery give Happer a funny urgency and generosity of spirit. The spectacle of this big man climbing into Ben Knox’s tiny shack is one of the numerous visual pleasures of Local Hero.
Peter Riegert wasn’t a big name when he got the lead in Local Hero (the studio wanted Henry ‘Fonz’ Winkler) and hasn’t become one since, though he seems from IMDb to have had regular work over the decades. Riegert is perfect in the role. He registers Mac’s growing attachments naturally and incisively. He’s delightful in the character’s rare outbursts of excitement – especially when the Northern Lights put on a show and Mac phones Happer to tell him. I first saw the film in May or June 1983. A few weeks later, I watched Denis Lawson at the Fortune Theatre in the title role of Mr Cinders. Thirty-five years on, that performance remains the most purely exhilarating that I’ve seen in any theatre – Lawson’s versatility in being Gordon Urquhart on screen then Jim Lancaster on stage made a lasting impression on me. The brilliance of his portrait of Gordon, which shines even brighter in long retrospect, is in creating a recognisably 1980s man who’s thoroughly at home in a community far removed from contemporary urban culture. Lawson’s dry-as-a-bone, throwaway line readings are glorious. In his early twenties here, Peter Capaldi has an amusing trace of puppy fat that’s amazing, given how skinny he’s become as he’s got older. Capaldi is energetically amusing as Danny, though not one of the actors for whom this viewer would have predicted sustained success to follow on the strength of what he does in Local Hero. The Danny-Marina subplot is very pleasant but stretched a little thin, in spite of Jenny Seagrove’s droll composure as the water goddess.
With the right actor in the part (and this whole film is splendidly cast), Bill Forsyth can create what seems like a three-dimensional male character with just a couple of details. A good example here is Jimmy Yuill’s Iain, who consistently treats Mac as a visiting celebrity – supervising the phone box (which requires many 10p pieces for each transatlantic call), asking for his autograph as he takes his leave of Ferness. The female roles are relatively few in number and dimensions – a criticism that could be levelled at Forsyth’s pictures more generally. (The obvious exception, Housekeeping, is his only film adapted from another’s work.) He tends to conceive women primarily as male fantasies, as creatures whose self-possession makes them all the more tantalising to the men who worship them. Marina and Stella certainly illustrate these traits (as Dee Hepburn’s Dorothy did in Gregory’s Girl) though two minor female characters in Local Hero are emotionally needier. The widowed village store owner (Sandra Voe), quietly carrying a torch for Victor, is the more successful of these. The teenager Pauline (Clare Guthrie) makes unrequited advances to Danny at the ceilidh. For her pains, she gets no more than a scornful scolding from her boyfriend Ricky (John Gordon Sinclair). (Ricky is also the village’s phantom motorbike menace.) This is only mildly funny and Pauline, with her punk make-up and hairdo, seems an idea rather than a person. For a while, the local vicar, a Ghanaian called Murdo McPherson, looks like being another but Christophe Asante gives him a panicky rectitude that wins you over.
In the Q&A Forsyth came close to saying that the film was the high point in the careers of the Scottish character actors in the cast: worried that people might think he was boasting, he hurriedly reworded the remark into something modestly bland, about what a happy company it was. He was right first time, of course – and this goes for more than the bit players. Jennifer Black still crop ups quite often on television, usually in police procedurals and rarely impressive, yet she was just right as Stella. In terms of cinema work, people such as Tam Dean Burn, Ray Jeffries, Willie Joss, David Mowat, Jonathan Watson and Jimmy Yuill stay in the memory thanks to the villagers they were in Local Hero. It’s sad and more surprising that the film has turned out to be the high point, by such a great distance, of Forsyth’s own career. Although both his next two pictures have their admirers, the disappointments of Comfort and Joy (1984) and Housekeeping (1987) outweigh their strengths. I’ve still not seen any of Forsyth’s subsequent three features: Breaking In (1989) had a lukewarm reception; Being Human (1994), a commercial and critical flop, marked the end of his Hollywood career. His most recent film, Gregory’s Two Girls, appeared (just) before the turn of the millennium. This surplus-to-requirements sequel to Gregory’s Girl (1981) didn’t fare well but that was almost beside the point. The fact that Forsyth was trying to revive his fortunes by resorting to old material was distressing in itself.
A feeling of regret therefore shadowed the EIFF screening – a feeling magnified by the Festival’s mounting the event in conjunction with the Royal Lyceum Theatre, where, in March 2019, a musical of Local Hero is scheduled to start a four-week run before transferring to the Old Vic. David Greig, who has co-written the show’s book with Forsyth, was due to take part in the EIFF Q&A. He couldn’t make it but, even in Greig’s absence, plenty of the convenor’s questions were about the forthcoming adaptation. The stage production has promising credentials. Not only is Forsyth involved but Mark Knopfler has written the songs. John Crowley, who will direct, has a strong theatre CV and made Brooklyn – another fine screen work about the meanings of home. By now, plenty of other hit movies have had an afterlife on stage, often as musicals, but there’s a particular poignancy in this happening to Local Hero because its creator has produced so little in recent years. Besides, you could tell from what he said that Forsyth is ambivalent about the project, though he was typically tactful and pleasant about it too. Local Hero is a one-off, then, in unhappy as well as happy ways. The latter, thank goodness, stay uppermost in your mind. Bill Forsyth had to keep shielding his eyes from the lighting in the Filmhouse theatre – it seemed an apt expression of a limelight-avoiding personality. He spoke quietly yet his self-deprecating wit came through loud and clear. You heard in his voice the unique humour of his wonderful film.
26 June 2018
[1] The village is actually Pennan in Aberdeenshire. The beach scenes were shot on Camusdarach Sands in the Highlands port of Mallaig.
[2] Afternote: Not so – see note on The Maggie.
[3] In reality, asteroid 7435 Happer, as designated by the International Astronomical Union, has fulfilled Felix’s ambition to have a comet named after him.
