Local Hero (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Graham Fuller

Produced by David Puttnam and Iain Smith; written and directed by Bill Forsyth; cinematography by Chris Menges; production design by Roger Murray-Leach; edited by Michael Bradsell; music by Mark Knopfler; costume design by Pip Newbery and Penny Rose; starring Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, Fulton Mackay, Denis Lawson, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black, Norman Chancer, Rikki Fulton, Alex Norton, Christopher Rozycki, Christopher Asante, and John Gordon Sinclair. Blu-ray, color, 111 min., 1983. A Criterion Collection release.

Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) was inspired by the determination of Scottish communities to get rich on the proceeds from the 1970s North Sea oil boom rather than accept the initial offers from petrochemical giants like Shell and Total. One original local hero was Ian Clark, the county clerk and chief administrative officer of the Shetlands Islands, who in 1973–74 used the skyrocketing of oil prices following the OPEC crisis to manipulate Shell—which reportedly said he was harder to negotiate with than then Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi—by rejecting its first offer and threatening to block the development of the Sullom Voe oil terminal. According to The Scotsman newspaper in 2005, Clark suspected the oil companies thought the Shetlands council was “completely bereft of all business-sense.” Shell subsequently made an offer that the council convener feared was “so generous as to prompt central government to interfere” and that ushered in an era of unparalleled prosperity for the islanders.

Keen to produce a “gentle comedy” with a Hollywood star that could sell it in America, David Puttnam, flush from his success with Chariots of Fire, as Forsyth was with his second feature Gregory’s Girl, asked the Glaswegian writer/director to develop one set in Scotland. To give Forsyth a flavor of what he had in mind, Puttnam invited him to a screening of two films that celebrate provincial community spirit, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which has a local hero in George Bailey, and Alexander Mackendrick’s Whisky Galore! (1949), an Ealing Studios comedy set on an island in the Outer Hebrides. But Local Hero would recall those films in ways that might be considered counterintuitive. If it evokes It’s a Wonderful Life at all, it is not as a typically Capraesque film but as a comedy that’s also a tragedy. Knox Oil and Gas executive “Mac” MacIntire (Peter Riegert), sent by his billionaire boss Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) to buy up the Scottish East Coast village of Ferness and its bay, where Happer plans to build a refinery, learns—like George—to reconsider his values. Unlike George, he is finally alienated from the community that embraced him.

Whisky Galore! anticipates Local Hero in that community spirit is not motivated by selflessness, but by mass individual cupidity—for stolen whisky and oil wealth, respectively. Ferness’s villagers, led by the hotelier/accountant Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson), are less harshly drawn than Whisky Galore!’s islanders, in keeping with Forsyth’s affection for even-tempered, low-key characters. He humanizes Happer (Burt Lancaster), despite his potentially ruinous industrial imperialism, by making him as lonely and wanting as Mac and capable of being redeemed by an earth-friendly cause. That cannot be said of the American billionaire who in 2011 disrupted the existence of the farmers, fishermen, and residents of Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, to construct the Trump International Golf Links on environmentally protected land—including four-thousand-year-old wind-blown sand dunes that the project scientifically devalued—and in 2014 renovated the 1906 course now known as the Ailsa–Trump Turnberry on the Firth of Clyde in Ayrshire. The financing of these golf resorts has been scrutinized for the laundering of dirty Russian money, and the struggles of Balmedie’s people were angrily documented in Anthony Baxter’s documentaries You’ve Been Trumped (2011) and A Dangerous Game (2014). The former used footage from Local Hero and prompted Forsyth to write a supportive article for The Guardian in which he described the “manifestly bleak scenario” of “real lives and livelihoods [being] mercilessly put to hazard by a malign concoction of egotistical bullying, corporate muscle flexing, craven averting of gaze by national politicians right to the very top and crass misreading of events by local authorities including police.”

It takes a Donald Trump to dislodge Forsyth from what the late Local Hero actor Fulton Mackay, interviewed about the movie for an invaluable 1983 South Bank Show documentary (included on the Blu-ray), describes as the filmmaker’s ”very innocent” view of people. Yet there’s a strain of ironic detachment in Local Hero. Though Gordon genuinely likes Mac and befriends him, he has a mercenary agenda and psychs him out, Forsyth suggests on the Blu-ray commentary track, by cooking for his dinner the injured rabbit Mac keeps in his room and which he named for his recently departed live-in girlfriend. The villagers might be expected to resist fiercely any attempt to coerce them to forsake their traditional livelihoods and homes (and their church, too), but they unite instantaneously, off screen, to cash in. They harness their community spirit to dismantling their community for lucre, showing no consciousness of the environmental devastation that will be caused by the building of a terminal. Casually discussing how they might spend their windfalls, two of them argue about whether a Rolls Royce or a Maserati would suit their needs best. This was not far-fetched. “Today the [Shetlands] are marked by…a fondness for luxury cars,” continued the 2005 Scotsman article. They were additionally marked by rising unemployment (following the initial job boom), the depletion of ancient trades, increased crime, and pollution.

According to a quotation cited in Alan Hunter and Mark Astaire’s book Local Hero: The Making of the Film (1983), Forsyth had something more “cosmic” in mind than did either It’s a Wonderful Life or Whisky Galore!: "I saw [the film] along the lines of a Scottish Beverly Hillbillies [1962–1971]—what would happen to a small community when it suddenly became immensely rich?—that was the germ of the idea and the story built itself from there,” Forsyth said. “It seemed to contain a similar theme to Brigadoon [1954], which also involved some Americans coming over to Scotland, becoming part of a small community, being changed by the experience and affecting the place in their own way. I feel close in spirit to the [Michael] Powell and [Emeric] Pressburger feeling, the idea of trying to present a cosmic viewpoint to people, but through the most ordinary things. And because both this film and I Know Where I'm Going! [1945] are set in Scotland, I've felt from the beginning that we're...treading the same water.”

Following A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I’m Going! was Powell and Pressburger’s second consecutive crusade against materialism. These films hymned British pastoralism and a spiritual sense of place as World War II drew to a close, and they looked askance at modernity: the medieval falcon that morphs into a Spitfire soaring over rural Kent in A Canterbury Tale augurs the NATO test jets that bring the Cold War to northeast Scotland in Local Hero. In I Know Where I’m Going!, the ambitious, cosmopolitan-seeming Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) takes a train from Manchester to western Scotland to marry a knighted English industrialist who has leased the island of Kiloran (Colonsay) in the Inner Hebrides. Stranded by bad weather on Mull, she succumbs to its beauty and the charm and vigor of the islanders, and falls reluctantly in love with the Navy officer (Roger Livesey) who is actually Kiloran’s laird. Celtic mysticism plays its part in giving the headstrong young woman what she needs—a virile partner her own age and a future attuned to nature—rather than what she wants.

Like Joan, Mac discovers there’s a spiritually enriching natural alternative to a fast-paced, materialistic life reliant on technology. Local Hero echoes I Know Where I’m Going!, too, in mocking tycoons (Joan’s elitist philistine fiancé is reduced to a pompous voice; Happer is tormented by his “abuse” therapist Moritz [Norman Chancer]); its human communication theme (emphasized in each film by crackly two-way radios and a phone box incongruously situated in an idyllic spot); and the understated eroticism that’s another factor in Mac’s conversion. Local Hero even pays homage to I Know Where I’m Going’s Finlay Currie when the uncredited member of Forsyth’s hired “stock company” playing Archie channels the veteran Scottish actor’s lairdly persona in an unscripted vignette in Local Hero’s cèilidh sequence.

Ferness’s villagers are singular but not as eccentric or “quirky” as commentators on Forsyth’s cinema frequently maintain, “routinely” and reductively so says the Scottish film scholar Jonathan Murray in his essay for the Blu-ray. Examples are the middle-aged general storekeeper (Sandra Voe) who loves a capitalist Murmansk trawler skipper (Christopher Rozycki), the black African minister (Christopher Asante) who like Mac fell in love with Ferness, and the pubgoer who is honored to escort Mac to the village phone box, lingers beside it while he makes a call, and later asks for his autograph. Gordon—his surname probably taken from Ernest A. Urquhart, chief executive of the early 1980s Shetlands Council—bargains persistently with Mac to get the villagers the best price for selling up, but he is otherwise affable, no “Gaddafi” figure. The eponymous local hero is Ben Knox (Mackay), one of whose forebears evidently emigrated to America and founded Happer’s oil company. A well-informed village sage and beachcomber, Ben holds up and eventually thwarts Ferness’s sale by refusing to sell the stretch of shore he owns and lives on in a doorless shack reminiscent of the Peggottys’ cottage in David Copperfield.

An amateur astronomer—like Happer, whom he persuades in an unseen conversation to build an observatory rather than an oil terminal—Ben shares the same environmental concern for the area as Marina (Jenny Seagrove). This is the ubiquitous frogwoman and research scientist from Knox’s Aberdeen facility with whom Danny Oldsen (Peter Capaldi), the gawky Knox gopher appointed to assist Mac, becomes smitten. Marina tells Danny that the water in the bay “is not as cold as it should be,” which to modern ears sounds like a harbinger of global warming until she explains that the temperature owes to the North Atlantic Drift. The school of gray seals she shows Danny are an endangered species, she says, thanks to culling by fisheries. Herself web-footed, thus kin to Scotland’s mythological selkies, she is “a fairy-tale” creation, while Ben “is an extravagantly romantic” one, Murray writes. He adds that Marina’s immersion in the sea and Ben’s inhabiting of the beach limit their effectiveness as the only characters “who articulate a realistic and considered sense of the natural world’s true worth, and of the ideal relationship humans might adopt toward it.” On the other hand, the self-interested villagers’ unconcern for the environmental destruction they invite predicted the general apathy and inertia that has greeted the climate crisis. Local Hero’s insouciant comedy contained a warning, but that sounds preachy—and there’s not a nanosecond of preachiness in Forsyth’s work.

Mac, who hitherto has only known his antiseptic apartment, the inside of his car, and his steel and glass skyscraper workplace, and whose preferred means of communication is by telex, is oblivious to the environmental threat he brings to Ferness, but he is keenly receptive to its metaphysical impact on him. A typically passive Forsyth protagonist, he is disinclined to speed up the negotiations, distracted as he is from his soulless career. The pivotal moment in the film follows Mac’s first call to Houston from Ferness’s totemic red telephone kiosk, which serves to hamper his ability to communicate with Happer and, like the blue police box in Dr. Who, is a portal to a different reality. Emerging from it, he stands silhouetted in the darkness—a place of profound change—and gazes humbly at the star-spattered cobalt night sky, then with a dawning awareness of the empyrean that so daunts him his eyes strain to catch it, tensing his forehead. The jingling coins in his pocket (soon to be replaced by sea shells), faint birdsong, and a few achily plaintive guitar notes from Mark Knopfler accompany this fleeting epiphany. Neither Forsyth’s deliberately bathetic cut to one of the absurd encounters between Happer and Moritz nor the film’s continuing drollery diminish Mac’s perceiving of the spectral. To the same end, Forsyth uses twinklings and tinklings, sparklings and shimmerings in Gregory’s Girl, Comfort and Joy (1984), and Housekeeping (1986). But the sublime is strongest in Local Hero, endowed as it is with cinematographer Chris Menges’s seascapes and pink and blue sunsets—in their sharpness, closer to David Caspar Friedrich’s than to those of Turner, Daubigny or Monet—and Knopfler’s sparse, empathetic score. Menges shot the film in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, so the image is letterboxed on 4:3 televisions; the 2K restoration makes the panoramas glorious. (The great cinematographer is the subject of a 1985 documentary on the Blu-ray that complements a 1983 interview with Forsyth discussing his early documentaries, notably one about Scottish forestry, and experimental films.)

Barely aware that he is undergoing a transformation, Mac takes to searching rock pools and returning to the hotel laden with shells that he scrubs in a wash basin as if conchology was his reason for visiting Scotland. His ineffable sense of belonging to Ferness owes not least to another force of nature. He has fallen for, or thinks he has, Gordon’s beautiful wife Stella (Jennifer Black), her name pertinently astral, who candidly admits her attraction to him—“What lovely eyelashes you’ve got”—but stops short of flirting because she and Gordon are deeply in love. Since the couple’s constant lovemaking is presented matter-of-factly, a thread in Local Hero’s humorous fabric, the sexual triangle is rarely mentioned in analyses of Local Hero. By no means trivial, it takes on increasing significance for Mac as the film yields to melancholy. When Mac drunkenly blurts out to Gordon that he loves Stella after the cèilidh (during which she invited him to waltz and he gently dipped her, as he’d seen Gordon dip her when seeing them dance privately on a previous occasion) and wants to swop lives with him, both men know that he intends no insult to Gordon and imposes no threat to his marriage. Yet Mac cannot bring himself to say goodbye to Stella when Happer, the unwelcome deus ex machina who arrives in Ferness by helicopter, orders him back to Houston, where Mac pins a single snapshot of Stella on his apartment’s noticeboard along with one of the Ferness beach and one of her with Gordon and himself. Predicated on Stella’s unobtainability, Mac’s love for her is as illusory as his unspoken yearning to remain in Ferness—indeed, her presence there would only increase his heartache. He is left with existential choices to make, but having heard what Wordsworth called “the still sad music of humanity,” he is better equipped to make them than he was before his Scottish idyll.

Graham Fuller is a freelance film critic based in New York City.

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