Bill Forsyth (1980)

Gregory’s Girl begins at night.  Five teenage boys ogle a young nurse as she undresses in the light of an upstairs window in an apartment block.  The film also ends nocturnally, as two of the same boys, Andy (Robert Buchanan) and Charlie (Graham Thompson), try vainly to hitch a lift.  Charlie, who’s been entirely silent until now, finally opens his mouth, suggesting they give up for the night.  He also informs Andy that the piece of cardboard he’s been holding up, indicating the pair’s intended and ambitious destination, contains a spelling mistake.  Andy’s and Charlie’s point of departure is a Scottish new town, near Glasgow.  The place they want to get to is Caracas – ‘Caracos’, according to Andy’s notice.  In another scene late on, Susan (Clare Grogan), one of several candidates for title character in Bill Forsyth’s romantic comedy, asks Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) why boys like numbers so much.  Gregory’s Girl contains plenty of these:  the appeal of ‘Caracos’ is that, again according to Andy, the ratio of women to men in the Venezuelan capital is 8:1.  In a pack of five at the start, Andy and Charlie were hardly threatening.  As a twosome at the end, they’re definitely pathetic.  Forsyth’s theme is the gauche ineptness of teenage boys and the cool, amused self-possession of the teenage girls they’re obsessed with.  His film suggests an answer to Susan’s question:  in more ways than one, there’s safety in numbers.

The atmosphere for this BFI screening was very different from the affectionate excitement percolating the packed Edinburgh Filmhouse for the special showing of Forsyth’s Local Hero I attended a few weeks ago – only thirty-odd people in NFT2, even though Gregory’s Girl was among this month’s ‘Big Screen Classics’.  The film contains many charming and funny moments but the basic premise and some of the details seem dated – rather awkwardly dated, in light of the shifts in sexual attitudes that have taken place over the decades since it first appeared.  I loved this movie when I first saw it in 1981 and for a second time a few years later but I now felt a bit uncomfortable during the opening sequence.  This wasn’t due only to wondering what the younger members of the sparse audience would think.  It was also because it seemed to me that Forsyth saw the young peeping Toms as not just harmless but endearing.  All the teenage characters go to the same comprehensive school and the slender plot revolves around Dorothy (Dee Hepburn), who becomes the cynosure of the school’s hitherto hopeless football team.  When the protagonist Gregory falls in love with Dorothy, the first person in whom he confides is Steve (William Greenlees), star baker on the home economics course.  These gender role reversals, though they work well enough thanks to the easy, straight-faced playing of the two actors concerned, no longer have intrinsic comic impact.

Still, there are many gracefully zany gags, especially visual ones, to enjoy.   Gregory in the school changing rooms, either dressed or topless:  he applies deodorant with his shirt on; surprised by Dorothy with his shirt off, he goes into a panic of modesty, using his index fingers to cover his nipples.  The headmaster (veteran comedian Chic Murray), sampling Steve’s choux pastry and playing the piano at break time.   A small, never identified figure in a penguin costume, shuffling along the corridor and directed by a succession of staff to various classrooms.  The soccer coach Phil Menzies (Jake D’Arcy) at home, talking to the plants in his greenhouse.  (Menzies is as socially clueless with women as the boys are, except that he seems to have turned asexual with age.)  Gregory, up late, leaving his electric toothbrush running while he has his breakfast.  Dorothy, when she scores a goal, getting kissed by the boys on the opposing team as well as her own.  I liked it that Forsyth shows a couple of the male teachers (Alex Norton and John Bett) more inclined to sniggering boredom than any of the students.  It’s a nice idea when Billy (Douglas Sannachan), an ex-pupil who’s now got a window-cleaning job, turns up during an English period to do his work on the other side of the classroom glass.  It’s too much, though, when the teacher (Maeve Watt) chucks a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Andy, who’s reading aloud from it, so that he’ll shut up and she can concentrate on talking with Billy.

Forsyth handles the mostly young cast impeccably.  John Gordon Sinclair is naturally eccentric:  what’s so winning about his performance is that, when he works at eccentricity, he’s even odder and funnier.  Another contender for being Gregory’s girl is his sister Madeline (Allison Forster), who’s several years younger than him but relatively wise.  The idea sounds twee but Allison Forster’s amusing gravity saves the day.   The remaining candidates are the relay of girls – Carol (Caroline Guthrie), Margo (Carol Macartney) and finally Susan (who fancies the hero from the start) – who, when Gregory gets a date with Dorothy, turn up instead of her.  This finale takes place on a Scottish summer evening and parts of it have a low-key enchanted quality, chiming with the Shakespeare text in the English lesson (although the coming, going and return of light in successive sequences may be a continuity issue rather than magic in the air).  This quality somehow anticipates Local Hero, as does Colin Tully’s mellow, enjoyable saxophone score, yet you can’t help being amazed at how far Bill Forsyth advanced, in the space of just a couple of years, from this pleasing but minor film to his similarly unassuming masterpiece.

16 August 2018