Local Hero. (15.)
Directed by Bill Forsyth. 1983
Starring Peter Riegert, Denis Lawson, Peter Capaldi, Fulton Mackay, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black and Burt Lancaster. 107 mins. Out on a 2 disc
Of the many attributes needed to have a long and effective career as a film director, talent ranks some way down the list. Success does not always go to the most creative but the strongest, the most determined, the most opportunistically flexible, and the lucky. Inevitably, a lot of very fine people get lost, mashed up and thrown out by the system. I accept that, see that realistically it probably has to be that way, but wish that Bill Forsyth hadn't been one of those that didn't stay the course. After Local Hero, it seemed that maybe he'd be set for a great career but somehow it all fell in on itself and he hasn't made a single film this century.
Local Hero though is a trip back to happier times: of British Film industry triumphalism; of Goldcrest and Handmade; of Colin Welland at the Oscars announcing the British Were Coming and of David Puttnam going. I can remember one very happy afternoon watching a double bill of Chariots of Fire and Gregory's Girl at the local cinema. After Gregory was a surprise hit Forsyth had a window to strike out and do something a bit bigger.
Local Hero kind of pre-empts the Yuppie Nightmare genre, the After Hours/ Something Wild type films where smug, rich people would be taken out of the comfort zone and put through black comedy terrors. In 1983, possibly before people really knew what Yuppies were, Forsyth takes a Texas oil executive (Riegart) out of his comfort zone and puts him in paradise, a small remote Scottish coastal village. He spends a blissful week there getting to know the locals that will, quite possibly, ruin his life.
Local Hero is a twisty one because it subverts twee, cosy expectations, while at the same time completely playing up to those twee, cosy expectation. Riegert has been sent there to negotiate the purchase of the whole village to build an ugly oil refinery on. But rather than being outraged, the villagers can't wait to become stinking rich and are eager for Urguhart (Lawson) who is the hotel owner/ accountant/ taxi driver and chief negotiator to screw the American for as much money as possible.
When it came out the talk was of this being a modern-day Ealing comedy, and the spirit is definitely there, but Forsyth's comic sensibility is all his own. He specialises in jokes that don't seem to have any logic or reason for being funny: like Riegart trying to negotiate with a fisherman about including a dollar sign in the sign renaming his boat the silver dollar; or the motorbike that zooms around the village. It's gentle humour, but not always soft. There's plenty of cynicism. There's a ruthlessness to the villagers and when a late spanner is thrown into the works there is a suggestion that they will turn nasty while Lawson character seems willing to negotiable on everything.
Though the film is full of tourist board shots, the locals are cavalier about the loss of the natural beauty. The outsiders are the innocents. Capaldi as the co-negotiator sent from Aberdeen to help is guilelessly naive, bewitched by the scenery and marine biologist Seagrove. He even has a similar awkward running style to John Gordon Sinclair's in Gregory's Girl. (That someone could go from playing this gormless kid to being Malcolm Tucker, or even Doctor Who, is either a testament to Capaldi's acting range or a depressing comment on the ageing process.)
It is telling, given what would happen later in his career, that the American scenes mostly don't work at all and Lancaster's extended cameo as the boss of the oil company is disappointing. The film as a whole now looks calculated. In comparison, Gregory's Girls was a genre flick that seemed sui generis, a film that was beholden to nobody. In Local Hero you can see all the pressures, all the special interests that looking over his shoulders, the gun that was not being held to his head but was sat at the back of the drawer just in case. Local Hero is lovely and charming and wonderful and something we can show to the rest of the world and say Up Yours Truffaut, British cinema is no contradiction but a great and glorious thing. But it's not a patch on Gregory's Girl.
After Local Hero, Forsyth seemed to be in a situation where doors were open to him. And they were, but it is rarely that straightforward. Spielberg, Woody Allen, Tarantino and before that Kubrick, had a degree artistic freedom but everybody else, even people like Scorsese, have to constantly hustle to get films made. Even if you are absolutely obsessed with the form it must be demoralising and apparently Forsyth has perspective enough to have better things to do with his time.
And he didn't help himself. His follow up, Comfort and Joy, a Glasgow set comedy-drama about the ice cream wars that tested the patience of his firmest fans. After that, he went to America, made Housekeeping which is a beautiful film, but lost his way and eventually made the big-budget flop Being Human with Robin Williams. At the end of the last century, he turned out Gregory's Two Girls, a belated sequel to his greatest triumph, which was widely hated, because it had John Gordon Sinclair as a teacher who listens to Noam Chomsky and letches after school girls. It failed because it was an honest sequel: a realistic portrayal of where his character might be twenty years on that refused to exploit the goodwill for the first film.
So to summarise: it's still great, but not perhaps quite as great as you remember it. One way in which time has hurt it, is the music. At the time I wasn't keen on Knopfler's score but since then it's become something that's heard every other week on Match Of The Day as the warm-up music at St James Park for every Newcastle United match. And I suspect that it is going to sink a little further in my esteem because next year we're getting Local Hero the stage musical with music and lyric by Knopfler at the Old Vic. I suspect of all the horrors 2020 has the potential to deliver, Local Hero The Musical is a relatively minor one, but it will still hurt. Just please, no millennial take on Gregory's Girl with Ansel Elgort.
Extras
Commentary with Forsyth and Mark Kermode.
Interview with Bill Forsyth.
Getting In On The Action.
A Conversation with Peter Capaldi and John Gordon Sinclair.
The South Bank Show: The Making of Local Hero.
Original trailer.
Directed by Bill Forsyth. 1983
Starring Peter Riegert, Denis Lawson, Peter Capaldi, Fulton Mackay, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black and Burt Lancaster. 107 mins. Out on a 2 disc
Of the many attributes needed to have a long and effective career as a film director, talent ranks some way down the list. Success does not always go to the most creative but the strongest, the most determined, the most opportunistically flexible, and the lucky. Inevitably, a lot of very fine people get lost, mashed up and thrown out by the system. I accept that, see that realistically it probably has to be that way, but wish that Bill Forsyth hadn't been one of those that didn't stay the course. After Local Hero, it seemed that maybe he'd be set for a great career but somehow it all fell in on itself and he hasn't made a single film this century.
Local Hero though is a trip back to happier times: of British Film industry triumphalism; of Goldcrest and Handmade; of Colin Welland at the Oscars announcing the British Were Coming and of David Puttnam going. I can remember one very happy afternoon watching a double bill of Chariots of Fire and Gregory's Girl at the local cinema. After Gregory was a surprise hit Forsyth had a window to strike out and do something a bit bigger.
Local Hero kind of pre-empts the Yuppie Nightmare genre, the After Hours/ Something Wild type films where smug, rich people would be taken out of the comfort zone and put through black comedy terrors. In 1983, possibly before people really knew what Yuppies were, Forsyth takes a Texas oil executive (Riegart) out of his comfort zone and puts him in paradise, a small remote Scottish coastal village. He spends a blissful week there getting to know the locals that will, quite possibly, ruin his life.
Local Hero is a twisty one because it subverts twee, cosy expectations, while at the same time completely playing up to those twee, cosy expectation. Riegert has been sent there to negotiate the purchase of the whole village to build an ugly oil refinery on. But rather than being outraged, the villagers can't wait to become stinking rich and are eager for Urguhart (Lawson) who is the hotel owner/ accountant/ taxi driver and chief negotiator to screw the American for as much money as possible.
When it came out the talk was of this being a modern-day Ealing comedy, and the spirit is definitely there, but Forsyth's comic sensibility is all his own. He specialises in jokes that don't seem to have any logic or reason for being funny: like Riegart trying to negotiate with a fisherman about including a dollar sign in the sign renaming his boat the silver dollar; or the motorbike that zooms around the village. It's gentle humour, but not always soft. There's plenty of cynicism. There's a ruthlessness to the villagers and when a late spanner is thrown into the works there is a suggestion that they will turn nasty while Lawson character seems willing to negotiable on everything.
Though the film is full of tourist board shots, the locals are cavalier about the loss of the natural beauty. The outsiders are the innocents. Capaldi as the co-negotiator sent from Aberdeen to help is guilelessly naive, bewitched by the scenery and marine biologist Seagrove. He even has a similar awkward running style to John Gordon Sinclair's in Gregory's Girl. (That someone could go from playing this gormless kid to being Malcolm Tucker, or even Doctor Who, is either a testament to Capaldi's acting range or a depressing comment on the ageing process.)
It is telling, given what would happen later in his career, that the American scenes mostly don't work at all and Lancaster's extended cameo as the boss of the oil company is disappointing. The film as a whole now looks calculated. In comparison, Gregory's Girls was a genre flick that seemed sui generis, a film that was beholden to nobody. In Local Hero you can see all the pressures, all the special interests that looking over his shoulders, the gun that was not being held to his head but was sat at the back of the drawer just in case. Local Hero is lovely and charming and wonderful and something we can show to the rest of the world and say Up Yours Truffaut, British cinema is no contradiction but a great and glorious thing. But it's not a patch on Gregory's Girl.
After Local Hero, Forsyth seemed to be in a situation where doors were open to him. And they were, but it is rarely that straightforward. Spielberg, Woody Allen, Tarantino and before that Kubrick, had a degree artistic freedom but everybody else, even people like Scorsese, have to constantly hustle to get films made. Even if you are absolutely obsessed with the form it must be demoralising and apparently Forsyth has perspective enough to have better things to do with his time.
And he didn't help himself. His follow up, Comfort and Joy, a Glasgow set comedy-drama about the ice cream wars that tested the patience of his firmest fans. After that, he went to America, made Housekeeping which is a beautiful film, but lost his way and eventually made the big-budget flop Being Human with Robin Williams. At the end of the last century, he turned out Gregory's Two Girls, a belated sequel to his greatest triumph, which was widely hated, because it had John Gordon Sinclair as a teacher who listens to Noam Chomsky and letches after school girls. It failed because it was an honest sequel: a realistic portrayal of where his character might be twenty years on that refused to exploit the goodwill for the first film.
So to summarise: it's still great, but not perhaps quite as great as you remember it. One way in which time has hurt it, is the music. At the time I wasn't keen on Knopfler's score but since then it's become something that's heard every other week on Match Of The Day as the warm-up music at St James Park for every Newcastle United match. And I suspect that it is going to sink a little further in my esteem because next year we're getting Local Hero the stage musical with music and lyric by Knopfler at the Old Vic. I suspect of all the horrors 2020 has the potential to deliver, Local Hero The Musical is a relatively minor one, but it will still hurt. Just please, no millennial take on Gregory's Girl with Ansel Elgort.
Extras
Commentary with Forsyth and Mark Kermode.
Interview with Bill Forsyth.
Getting In On The Action.
A Conversation with Peter Capaldi and John Gordon Sinclair.
The South Bank Show: The Making of Local Hero.
Original trailer.
