Local Hero (1983) dir Bill Forsyth
A great early 80s British light comedy drama. Peter Reigert (who I have never seen in anything else) plays Mac, a lawyer / accountant / fixer working for Texas based Happer oil. The CEO, Mr Happer (Burt Lancaster), sends Mac to oversee the purchase of an entire Scottish fishing village that they want to demolish to build a new oil terminal. Mac expects at least some of the villagers, led by their lawyer / accountant / hotel manager Gordon Urquart (Denis Lawson - Wedge from Star Wars), to put up somewhat of a fight. But they are not quite the simple folk he expects. They already know what is going on and Urquart intends to squeeze as much cash as possible from the big oil company. It also co-stars a young Peter Capaldi, almost unrecognisable at times, as Oldsen, a Scottish Happer Oil employee assigned to help Mac and Jenny Seagrove as marine biologist Marina, working for them in what she knows is really just a job to generate good PR in case of environmental problems. Marina has slightly webbed feet, making her seem a bit like a mermaid as she swims, which her job requires a lot of. This is possibly a nod to the Jerry Anderson puppet show Stingray that had a mermaid called Marina. (And maybe having watched Team America last week this is what subconsciously made me decide to watch this film that I have seen many times before). It also features a host of other faces, mainly Scottish actors, familiar to anyone who has watched a lot of British TV over the years, like me. But sometimes it takes a while to recognise them, because this was made over 40 years ago. One of the non-Scots is Christopher Rozycki, who is great as the captain of a Soviet fishing trawler that makes frequent visits to the village. He quite clearly is not a believer in the political ideology of his homeland. He has a great line I wish I could remember word for word, but at one point he says to Mac something like “Don't look so worried. You are doing a great thing here. You are making people very rich!”.
It is a beautifully made film, technically very, very good. It's set mainly in the village, but starts in Houston and switches back there a couple of times and has some stunning scenes of the Scottish countryside and coast. There's no great tension to the story, no massive plot twists. It's quite a gentle tale of Mac falling in love with the village he has basically come to destroy, but the locals just wanting the money. Forsyth got a well deserved BAFTA for the direction and a nomination for the original script. It also got a number of other worthy nominations including Chris Menges' cinematography and Mark Knopfler's modern score that includes the iconic “Going home” guitar – saxophone instrumental that accompanies the end credits. The only acting one was for Lancaster but the rest of the cast are very good, even down to some quite minor roles.
I do have to pick it up on a couple of factual issues. The village is shown on a map in North West Scotland, but the oil is (was) all on the east, in the North Sea between Scotland and Norway. And I know, from a friend who used to live there and remembers the filming, it was mainly filmed on location in various villages on the east coast. The other thing might have been a deliberate joke at the expense of Hollywood. This is when Marina is showing Oldsen a colony of what are described as grey seals, but what we see on screen are quite clearly sea-lions, the sort you might well see in California but certainly not Scotland! Those don't really detract from the overall film though which is one of my all time favourites.
10 / 10
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